The Thursday Murder Club
I am not normally a fan of ‘celebrity’ writers – or indeed celebrity much else. Football managers, for example, by which I mean former big-name players whose first or second managerial appointment is to a top club. There’s more than a whiff of unfairness in the air, a sense that their name brings with it massive breaks not available to ‘ordinary’ folk who may well be toiling in the background unnoticed for years and hoping against hope for something, anything, to happen.
There is certainly no shortage of celebrity writers, authors who are household names for something other than writing. Alan Titchmarsh, Fern Brittan, Graham Norton – to name but three, all of whom are well known from TV. Yes, I know I sound dismissive. No doubt their novels are enjoyed by millions. They might even be really good. They certainly sell well. But to what extent are the stratospheric sales – certainly of their first book – primarily a result of name recognition? That name alone is a precious commodity, enough to get the book a plum spot on one of the game-changing special-offers tables at the front of Waterstones, a headline in bookshops’ promotional emails and a place in the (shrinking) supermarket book aisles.
That’s why I shut my ears to the fanfare around The Thursday Murder Club, the first novel by Richard Osman, until I was charmed and disarmed by an interview in the paper promoting the follow-up. And yes, it is annoyingly good – as is the second in the series, The Man Who Died Twice, which I have just finished.
Annoying because… well, I have just explained why. But annoying for another reason too. The books hoodwink the reader into assuming that such an effortless read must have been equally effortless to write. It’s the same sleight-of-hand that lures us into thinking that writing for children must be – ahem – child’s play. And I do not find fiction effortless to write. In fact, I can’t do it at all. It’s frankly something of a relief, then, to read in the acknowledgements that Osman found the whole writing process bloody hard work.
You don’t need to be a master sleuth to spot the tell-tale signs of popular, page-turning crime fiction – the large, generously-spaced font, the bitesize chapters, usually ending with a mini-twist or cliffhanger, and so on. The stories are excellently structured and paced too. The plot doesn’t stand still for a moment, the short chapters offer us constantly shifting perspectives and the subplots bubble away. There’s no downtime to dwell on how ridiculous it all is (though I admit I found the pier scene in book two particularly far-fetched).
Osman’s writing is deliciously, unashamedly moreish. Opening either book is like settling down, glass in hand, in front of a roaring fire in the depths of winter. Granted, murder is the central plot device – including cold-blooded, gruesome executions – but the experience of reading The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice will still leave you feeling good about the world.
The setting – Coopers Chase, a luxury retirement village near to a fictional town called Fairhaven – could be somewhere in Midsomer, another fictional location populated by larger-than-life, cartoonish types and where you sense the sun is always shining. It’s that Midsomer-esque quality that helps make these books such delightful escapist fare.
Grim reality rarely intrudes. There’s no climate change, no cost-of-living crisis, no collapsing NHS. Instead, there are huge dollops of friendship, kindness and decency. The main characters all like and get on with each other. Police officers don’t childishly pull rank: Chris and Donna are best friends, even though one is a fifty-something DCI and the other a lowly constable learning the ropes before joining CID. Even the baddies have their soft side. Consider this exchange (in the second book) involving Frank Andrade Jr, a mafioso just arrived from the USA to kill the gangster Martin Lomax for ‘losing’ diamonds worth £20 million:
“Looks like I won’t have to kill you today, Martin!”
“Looks like it, Frank. How is your wife, did she get the muffins I sent?”
The trials and tribulations that come with older age can’t be completely ignored – one of the minor characters is slowly slipping away as a result of dementia, for example – and Osman certainly doesn’t shy away from gentle reflections on life’s Big Questions — family, love, loyalty, ageing, death.
But the overwhelming sense is that the members of the Thursday Murder Club are in rude health and having the time of their (long) lives. That’s perhaps another secret of the books’ appeal. Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce and Ibrahim are living out the senior years we all hope to enjoy – a time that is active, carefree, and enriched by companionship, not one impoverished by loneliness, lack of money or some unpleasant and debilitating condition or other.
And what of the four members of the Thursday Murder Club? Elizabeth apart, perhaps, there is nothing particularly remarkable about them, though in a Miss Marple kind of way their age is a sort of superpower, enabling them to ask, say and do things the police simply wouldn’t be able to.
Yes, they live secure and comfortable lives, but – to be fair – things have moved on a great deal from the “gentrified world of privilege and entitlement, of property and inherited wealth, of starched-collar formality and strict etiquette” that Agatha Christie described in her first Poirot novel a hundred or so years ago – a world I wrote about here.
We have strict gender balance, for starters. Former MI5 agent and unofficial leader Elizabeth provides the investigative skills and the knowhow when it comes to basic spycraft and dirty tricks. Joyce is a retired nurse, so handy to have at the scene of a dead body. She absorbs even the tiniest details around her but usually needs Elizabeth’s mind to fathom out the significance of what she has taken in. Regular extracts from Joyce’s gossipy diary offer a window into her world, her sometimes tense relationship with her daughter hinting at intergenerational family pressures that many readers will recognise.
Ron, meanwhile, is old school. He’s a loud, plain-speaking, West Ham-supporting ex-trade unionist who is warm and cuddly really but won’t – or doesn’t know how to – show it. Anyway, by book two he’s quietly and unobtrusively spending his nights on a camp bed by his mate Ibrahim’s hospital bed. Not, however, unobtrusively enough to escape Joyce’s notice; she later offers to drop off clean underwear, even though Ron’s manly attitude is “Honestly, no need.”
And there’s Ibrahim, the ex-psychiatrist with a sharply analytical mind. Like Ron, he is less prominent in book two. Mugged early in the proceedings, his recovery from his scars – mental as much as physical – is slow and painful. Here again is a hint at the reason for the books’ huge appeal. A subplot involving an assured and self-confident senior citizen who has the stuffing knocked out of them by some brush with mortality – an accident, a physical altercation – is one that will resonate with many of us.
Did I mention that the books are funny too – occasionally laugh-out-loud so. There are many, many great lines to enjoy. Here’s one of my favourites, a typical Joyce observation: “I’d welcome a burglar. It would be nice to have a visitor.”
And what’s not to like about writing like this, from the first book?
There had been a schism in the Cryptic Crossword Club. Colin Clemence’s weekly solving challenge had been won by Irene Dougherty for the third week running. Frank Carpenter had made an accusation of impropriety and the accusation had gained some momentum. The following day a profane crossword clue had been pinned to Colin Clemence’s door, and the moment he had solved it, all hell had broken loose.
The Thursday Murder Club is not a novel about Colin, Irene, Frank and the Cryptic Crossword Club. In fact, they are never mentioned again. But it typifies Osman’s style. One paragraph — 67 words — conveying so much information, and I don’t mean about crosswords.
The Thursday Murder Club did such a good job of reminding me of the joys of (well written) popular crime fiction that I made another impulse buy a couple of weeks later – A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz. I make a point of avoiding the back-cover blurbs of novels – I love setting off from page one with absolutely no idea of the direction of travel – but I am a sucker for a puff quote from someone I respect and admire. And what better recommendation than this from the marvellous Kate Mosse: “Witty, wry, clever, a fabulous detective story.” Okay, count me in.
Long before the end of the opening chapter it was clear that this was not a standalone novel, and not even the second in a series – it’s the third. Yikes. To quote Poirot: mille tonnerres! I have written often about how I always like to start any series from the very beginning. The first Poirot I read was The Mysterious Affair at Styles. My first (and so far only) Miss Marple was The Body in the Library, the first ‘proper’ one. I am also working through the Giordano Bruno novels by SJ Parris in order, starting with Heresy (I have already read one of the others, out of sequence, but I will go back to it when the time comes).
I was already familiar with the name Anthony Horowitz without quite being sure where from. The book itself reveals all – and I don’t mean on an introductory page. A Line to Kill is a bit like one of the those ‘alternate universe’ episodes (as the Americans say) from sci-fi series like Stargate-SG1 in which the characters and setting are similar to – but not quite the same as – the actual world. Or maybe it’s more like the TV series The Trip, where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play slightly exaggerated versions of themselves.
‘Anthony Horowitz’, then, is one of the book’s protagonists – a writer who has written a couple of true-crime books based on the work of ex-detective, private investigator and police consultant Daniel Hawthorne. Horowitz reminds us in passing that he wrote some episodes of Midsomer Murders and some (officially sanctioned) James Bond novels. Actually, he’s written much more besides, Wikipedia tells me, including plenty of stuff for television that I enjoy like Poirot and a long-forgotten detective/time-travelling mashup series from the late 90s called Crime Traveller, as well as [he adds, excitedly] two Sherlock Holmes novels.
And the verdict? Let’s just say that I now have The Word Is Murder (the first of the Hawthorne series) and Moonflower Murders in front of me, and I am hot on the trail of those Holmes novels.
Some of the content above first appeared in a regular books, TV and films blog I wrote between 2020 and 2022.
My First Album Buys
Ah, memory. You taunt and tease us. You fade and frustrate us. You even make things up and lie to us. What a shit you are.
This post overlaps with and follows loosely on from Radio blah blah: Records and record buying in 1977, my blog of what I was listening to and buying in the year I first caught the pop/rock bug. This follow-up differs in two ways: it focuses on albums rather than singles and I have extended the timeframe to 1979.
Compiling a list of first album buys was always going to be a trickier task than the singles equivalent. Most of the singles I bought were in the charts at the time, so scrolling through the Top 50s for 1977 made it easy to establish a fairly accurate chronology. Not so with albums. That’s because I rarely bought anything newly released, concentrating instead on standout albums from the few groups I knew and liked.
For years I took it for granted that I graduated to serious record collecting in 1978, the year I started to listen to rock music fairly regularly. Now I am not quite so sure. It’s like trying to guess the big picture from a handful of jigsaw pieces. I am trying to connect a few specific but disjointed memories to put together a timeline that fits.
Here’s one memory, for example: receiving Queen’s News of the World album as a Christmas present in 1977. [Click here for more Queen memories.] Another is of wasting money on not one but two dreadful Top of the Pops albums (cover versions of chart hits played by an in-house band of session musicians).
A third is of asking Santa for a K-Tel compilation album called Disco Fever (No 1 in the album charts in November 1977). Those compilations were better than their Top of the Pops equivalents in that they featured original versions of songs, though with early fade-outs to fit in more tracks. I have no idea why I was obsessed with Disco Fever – the likes of Baccara, the Floaters and Hot Chocolate – but I was, for five minutes at least.
There are a few more jigsaw pieces like those lying around – mental snapshots that linger. Taken together, they suggest that in 1978 I was actually spending what little money I had on watching Bolton Wanderers. Like all my friends, I was football-mad as a kid. Wigan were non-league at the time and Bolton were doing well, promoted that year from the then second division to the first (ie the equivalent of the Premiership). The colossal sum of £2 covered bus and train fare, a ticket for the match and a programme.
Anyway, the landmarks I hope to glimpse on this meander down a fog-blanketed Memory Lane are those first few albums I collected. It will have been a gradual, haphazard, toe-in-the-water process, checking if I liked the temperature. There is some guesswork: I could add the word ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ to most of the sentences that follow, and apologies in advance for overuse of phrases like ‘I think’ and ‘at about this time’.
There was an album of TV themes in the house pre-1977 but, other than my dad’s small collection of easy listening stuff (think James Last and weep), no rock music – that is, until my (older) brother started to buy albums, beginning with Rush, that he had heard in school. The first ‘proper’ album I held in my hands may well have been Elton John’s Greatest Hits which my dad borrowed from somebody at work, the first and only time I remember him doing so. There are few better openings to an album — albeit a best-of — than Your Song followed by Daniel. I taped it – the first songs I ever taped that weren’t ruined by the DJ’s jibber-jabber.
The first album I bought – well, that was bought for me – was Queen’s A Day at the Races, possibly in Llandudno and probably during the Whitsun holiday in late-May 1977.
A Day at the Races was my introduction, aged 10, to grown-up, relatively uncommercial rock music. I played it endlessly for days, weeks, months. This album shaped who and what Queen were in my mind – and what to expect from an album – at an age when I was naturally highly impressionable. I literally had nothing else to go off for a while.
Everything about A Day at the Races oozed sophistication, from the elegance of the gatefold sleeve to the sumptuous smorgasbord of musical styles. Here, it seemed to me, were four dedicated musicians producing serious art, a world away from glittery show-offs singing vacuous pop songs and hamming it up on Top of the Pops. From the moment that needle met vinyl and the Escher-esque ascending scale faded into Tie Your Mother Down, I was hooked.
It took about four months to record, which translated as forever to a ten-year-old. I read a Brian May quote that a record would be around for ever, meaning that you had a responsibility to make it as good as you possibly could: his sentiment resonated precisely with what I was hearing and feeling. A Day at the Races created a benchmark of quality and style in my mind that I still find myself judging records by to this day.
The year 1978 arrives and the fog of memory thickens somewhat. I bought the remaining Queen albums, working backwards from A Night at the Opera (which has Bohemian Rhapsody on it), but was still mainly taping from the radio. I began listening to the Great Easton Express on Liverpool-based Radio City, an evening rock show presented by the DJ Phil Easton which broadcast once or twice a week. He even read out a letter I sent in. Dear Phil, I am twelve and I listen to the show every night. I’m Queen mad. Please play X, Y or Z by them (all album tracks as opposed to singles, if memory serves). He actually played something I didn’t ask for.
I also listened to Alan Freeman’s Saturday rock show, broadcast simultaneously on Radio 1 and Radio 2 (meaning it was in stereo) at 3pm. Actually, I listened to the opening five minutes, the bit when he read out who was on that week’s playlist. I was still far too immersed in football at that age to miss the latest scores coming in – not to mention bewildered by a lot of what he was playing (King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer the likely culprits).
We went on a school residential to a place called Hammarbank in the Lake District in July 1978. It had a record player in what must have been a common room, and we played a copy of 24 Carat Purple (a sort of Deep Purple best-of) to death in the evenings. I have no idea who it belonged to. We happily headbanged (‘freaking out’, we called it) to side two: Speed King from In Rock and two tracks from the Made in Japan live album, Smoke on the Water and Child in Time. 24 Carat Purple was an early buy – and by far the heaviest record (single or album) I had in my collection.
Another Hammarbank favourite was the live single Rosalie by Thin Lizzy, which was a big hit. Cue another snapshot – on holiday somewhere, and me and my brother being treated to an album each of our choice. He may have plumped for All the World’s a Stage by Rush. My pick was definitely Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous – which makes it a post-Hammarbank memory, probably the summer holidays. I associate all my childhood holidays, Christmases and birthdays with double albums. The Song Remains the Same, Seconds Out, Made in Japan, Stage (a David Bowie live album), The Wall – all too expensive for me to afford, all bought for me as treats or presents.
Another one was a fairly obscure film soundtrack album called FM. The film itself bombed: I don’t think even the most obscure of cable channels has ever shown it. Almost certainly I wanted the soundtrack because it included We Will Rock You (a hefty two minutes out of 80 minutes of music). Looking back at the track list, it is still too ‘American’ for my taste — James Taylor, the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Linda Ronstadt — but I immediately warmed to Life in the Fast Lane (the Eagles), Life’s Been Good (Joe Walsh) and the more chart-friendly Lido Shuffle by Boz Scaggs.
At some point in 1978, I think, the local British Legion started an under-18s disco on Mondays, and the DJ included a regular heavy rock slot. (The term ‘heavy metal’ for me means bands that came along a bit later like Iron Maiden and Saxon.) Every week was the same: Black Dog by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Let There Be Rock and Whole Lotta Rosie, two tracks from a just-released AC/DC live album. Black Betty by Ram Jam was another – a song I detested. Oddly enough I have never bought much Black Sabbath or AC/DC. Maybe I was just fed up of hearing the same tracks week after week. Of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, more in a moment.
I first became aware of Genesis sometime in 1978 via a school friend who was mad about the song The Knife. It’s a nine-minute prog-rock classic from 1970 that went way over my head. But he also had their current album, And Then There Were Three. Its warmer sound was much more to my liking, particularly the single Follow You Follow Me (which plenty of fans of early Genesis hate). He gave me the album, presumably thinking himself too cool and sophisticated for the shorter, commercial stuff. (He also gave me his copy of Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll – the title track another Legion disco favourite, I think.)
To my mind Genesis played ‘prog’ – progressive rock, a label I used for music that was typically long, adventurous and lyrically obscure but not guitar-dominated enough to fit in the ‘heavy rock’ category. As well as Rush, my brother was buying albums by Wishbone Ash and Budgie that didn’t appeal to me at the time (and still don’t). Another I didn’t much care for was Live Tapes by Barclay James Harvest, though I find it very listenable nowadays. The version of Rock ‘n’ Roll Star on there is a shoo-in for my (yet to be compiled) fifty-tracks-by-fifty-different-groups list.
Other than Genesis, I gravitated towards three ‘supergroups’ – Yes, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin – though quite what piqued my interest and when is a bit hazy. Dark Side of the Moon was, I think, an early buy – but probably my only Floyd album until The Wall came out at the end of 1979. Javelin, a record shop in Wigan, began stocking imported versions of albums on the Atlantic label. They were cheaper than regular albums, the covers clipped along the bottom edge to mark them as imports. That’s how I bought the fourth Led Zeppelin album (the untitled one with Black Dog and also Stairway to Heaven) and Going for the One by Yes.
I first heard Fool’s Overture by Supertramp on Radio 1 probably in the summer of 1977. It lodged in my mind because (a) it is an album track and daytime radio tended to play only singles, and (b) it is about 10 minutes long. Give a Little Bit was Supertramp’s then-current single. I didn’t buy it and surprisingly (it is one of their very best songs) it was only a minor hit, but I did eventually get a copy of the album Even in the Quietest Moments, which includes both tracks.
That was perhaps two years later, the spring of 1979, when another single of theirs, The Logical Song, was in the charts. It’s such a great song – typically quirky and with wonderfully defiant lyrics celebrating the bohemian free spirit – though one I have heard so many times now that I probably take its genius for granted. I bought the Breakfast in America album as soon as it came out, and that’s probably when I backtracked to Even in the Quietest Moments.
But then, oddly, I stopped, even though Breakfast in America was the fourth in a run of classic albums they released in the 70s. Perhaps it is because Supertramp were at the very limit of what I – an almost-teenage rock fan – thought of as ‘acceptable’ music to be listening to.
I obviously didn’t mind what might be called art-rock, even when the emphasis was more on the art than the rock. A rereleased Virginia Plain by Roxy Music was one of my first single buys, but I didn’t care for their later smooth sound (Avalon etc). I also liked the quirkiness of 10cc, though they were also just a bit too poppy and chart-friendly for comfort.
And there was David Bowie, of course. Sound and Vision and Heroes, hits from 1977, were great (though nothing matched the sublime Life on Mars). I bought the album Diamond Dogs, a classic but also his first proper post-Ziggy release and not the easiest of listens for a twelve-year-old. Other than the glam-sounding Rebel Rebel, it is decidedly dark and dystopian – a foretaste of what was to come during his Berlin period. Hunky Dory, my second Bowie buy, was much more accessible; Changes is one of the all-time great side one track ones.
By the summer of 1979, then, my nascent record collection comprised the eight available Queen albums and bits and pieces – all low-hanging fruit – from the back catalogues of various big-name artists. Without much money to spend, I was wary of gambling what little I had on stuff that might turn out to be rubbish and so limited my buys to well-established groups – and to specific albums – I was sure I would like.
Two things changed at about this time. I was turning thirteen and losing interest in football. And I now had a paper round, which meant a bit more money. Album buying became serious and systematic. Within a couple of years I had the albums that still make up a sizeable portion of my listening to this day.
It’s very different nowadays, of course, especially for young people, most of whom access music largely or even exclusively online. And who would deny them the opportunity to listen to more or less anything – old or new – at relatively little cost other than their time? Who would argue against the convenience of simply pressing Play? Who would begrudge them the functionality of options like shuffle or curated playlists?
But convenience comes with a hidden cost. It’s the Stop button beside the Play button – that ability to just switch off a song or an album if we don’t immediately like what we hear. Just move on to the next track, the next album, the next group. We risk neglecting or rejecting the sort of music that perhaps needs a bit of time and effort to fully enjoy or appreciate, that doesn’t satisfy our need for instant gratification via a thumping riff, gorgeous melody or catchy chorus.
With a mere handful of records to my name, there really wasn’t much on those albums that I neglected or rejected. Cliché klaxon: I lived and breathed them. And not just the music. Everything about them – lyrics, artwork, even the sleeve notes. They’re (almost) all classics, of course – a much overused label that doesn’t just signal quality but also evokes a sense of timelessness. And time is indeed the key. My twelve-year-old self may not have realised it, but immersing myself in those albums meant that I had the time to dive beneath the surface and discover their hidden depths – learning to appreciate White Man as much as Somebody to Love, The Battle of Evermore as much as Stairway to Heaven, Fool’s Overture as much as Give a Little Bit, Awaken as much as Wonderous Stories.
And, yes, I would definitely ban the shuffle function.
This post includes material that was originally in the blog Radio blah blah: Records and record buying in 1977.
More Music Memories
Queen
Growing up as a Queen fan: teenage tales told through ten Queen-related objects
Rush
“Suddenly you were gone” – my appreciation of Canada’s finest. RIP Neil Peart
Radio Blah Blah
The singles chart, Radio 1 and record buying – memories from 1977
Queen + Adam Lambert Live Review
“They always deliver” – the words of concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith about Queen, at or around the time of the famous Wembley shows in 1986.
For anyone casually landing on this review of the Queen + Adam Lambert Rhapsody tour, let’s take that as a given. Queen deliver the goods – every time.
I love Queen. Let’s take that as another given. I have loved them ever since I was a ten-year-old – a lifetime ago. In fact, if you enjoy reading this little review, I recommend my blog Teenage tales of Queen via ten objects. It’s a collection of random-ish memories from my time growing up as a Queen fan in the late 70s.
Anyway, I could use the next 1,500 words or so to tell you how jaw-droppingly sublime the Queen + Adam Lambert show was in Manchester at the AO Arena on 30 May 2022 (six days ago, at time of uploading). But what’s the point? There are plenty of concert reviews and other Queen-related articles around that will do exactly that for you. In fact, here’s the Manchester Evening News review of the same show I attended.
My review offers, hopefully, a slightly different perspective – from, as I say, somehow who grew up with Queen, who worshipped them as a kid, and who – relevant for what we’re talking about here – saw them live several times from 1978 onwards.
But not someone who thinks either (a) that Queen have never ever put a foot wrong in their entire career or (b) the opposite extreme, that everything they have done since 1991 has been complete crap, a sell-out, a calamity, an outrage. No. I do think some of what they have done over the years has been a bit poo. I have never, for example, seen the We Will Rock You musical. Let’s call it the John Deacon analysis. But I still get butterflies in my stomach whenever I hear Brian’s guitar. For me, there’s no better sound in music.
I wrote this in my review of the film Bohemian Rhapsody:
It’s short-sighted to wax lyrical about every last Queen product — this replica sixpence, that T-shirt, this vodka, that board game. Some things are high quality and worthwhile; others are mediocre and a bit naff … Objectivity matters, even where ‘classic’ Queen is concerned and even more so in the case of post-Freddie and non-Queen projects.
from my review of the Bohemian Rhapsody film
So, bearing all the above in mind, let’s press on with some things that really are outstanding about the Queen + Adam Lambert show.
Well, for starters, it looks great – the staging, the lights. And it sounds magnificent as well. The ‘band’ – by which I mean Tyler Warren (percussion), Neil Fairclough (bass) and Spike Edney (keyboards and longtime Queen collaborator) – are note-perfect. The whole production is, in short, highly polished and professional, as you would expect.
Gonna rock, gonna roll you
Get you dancing in the aisles
Jazz you, razzmatazz you
With a little bit of style
And of course it is highly theatrical – dramatic entrances, costume changes aplenty, an overarching ‘opera house’ theme – even Brian floating adrift among the planets. Best of all, a long catwalk down to the B stage in the centre of the venue, adding to the sense (always there at Queen gigs anyway) that the audience is an integral part of the show.
And there’s Adam Lambert too. Just to be clear, I am not there to see him – 95% of the time my attention is elsewhere – but his costumes dazzle, his vocal range is astounding, and he carries off the uber-camp, theatrical-showman element of Freddie’s stage persona with aplomb. Brian and Roger would not be putting on a show like this – and enjoying their current immense worldwide popularity – with Paul Rodgers on lead vocals, that’s for sure.
Oddly enough, it’s the hyperbole that annoys me as much as anything. ‘Odd’ because a certain swaggering arrogance has been there from the very beginning – as the band themselves always freely admitted, and in fact boasted about. Words like ‘modest’ and ‘unassuming’ simply aren’t part of the Queen lexicon. In these days of 24-hour publicity machines, it’s harder than ever to ignore, to the point where I find programme notes, press releases and the like all but unreadable: phrases like “one of modern music’s greatest success stories”, “enrapturing audiences”, “the phenomeneon [sic] that is Queen and Adam Lambert” – even when they are spelled correctly. [As a side note, £15 for a programme that is riddled with typos is just not good enough.]
The programme opens with this quote from Brian, from 2019:
Our previous tour featured our most ambitious production ever, so we decided to rip it apart and get even more ambitious.
Well, yes and no.
To my mind, the staging isn’t that radically different: if you have attended a concert on any of the recent tours, you will have a good idea of what it will look like. Ric Lipson, the set designer, is quoted as saying that the opera-boxes backdrop “means that there are members of the audience actually surrounding the band and bringing a new staging energy to the show.” Okay, except that the band have offered an on-stage – actually, side-of-the-stage – VIP experience before. I splashed out on it in 2017. I’m glad I did, but I wouldn’t do it again. It was immediately obvious – doh – that out front is the band’s focus, not the side of the stage – a point that surely applies even more to seats placed literally at the back.
And no surprises either for seeing it summed up as state of the art – a high bar indeed. If I were being picky I would say that some of the computerised back-projections were a bit lame and, though the on-stage pyrotechnics were good, Rush, to make one comparison, took fireworks to another level (I was sat in the same block for the Clockwork Angels show in 2013 and remember feeling the heat from the pyros).
It was – again, no surprises – the (many) nods to Queen’s history that I particularly enjoyed. Notwithstanding the comment above about pyros, I loved Brian’s fireworks during A Kind of Magic, which brought to mind the original 1986 video. The on-stage lighting, which swivels and moves independently, harks back to the ‘G2 razors’ used on the Game and Hot Space tours. As for more subtle nods, what about the tapping of the conductor’s baton to usher in the taped introduction: a throwback to the A Night at the Opera tour.
There’s a comment in the programme about how, with Lambert’s arrival, nothing was “off limits” song-wise – “from the biggest hits of all time to brilliant b-sides and album tracks”. Again, yes and no. Anyone familiar with Live Around the World, the Queen + Adam Lambert live album culled from shows between 2014 and 2020, will know more or less what’s coming.
Could it be otherwise? The band quickly dropped Spread Your Wings and It’s Late from the (News of the World fortieth anniversary) 2017 US tour because of a lack of audience recognition. Given that a Queen + Adam Lambert show is aimed squarely at a mass audience, young and old, many of them coming to the band with a limited knowledge of the Queen back catalogue, most of the setlist writes itself. They don’t play much that isn’t on either the original Greatest Hits album or Greatest Hits II.
Anyway, here are a few observations about the show itself:
After a (new) Innuendo taped intro, the show opens with four hard-rock songs delivered back-to-back. Deafen ‘em and blind ‘em, as the band used to say. I have written elsewhere that Tear It Up was an unlikely set opener on the Works tour. Even more surprising that it remained in the set for the Magic Tour. Yet more surprising that it was resurrected by Queen + Adam Lambert in 2018. And so even more surprising that it is still in the set.
I was never a huge fan of Killer Queen live – a bit too lightweight for my taste for a live show – but it’s too big and mainstream a song to leave out these days and it’s an opportunity for Lambert to camp it up. The weakest song by far is Bicycle Race. Again, it’s not one that worked for me live back in the day – it’s captured for posterity on Live Killers – and here the backing vocals don’t quite work. Anyway, they again dial up the camp theatrics and quickly segue to an always magnificent Fat Bottomed Girls.
Although they took a bit of getting used to, I have grown to like the post-‘86 songs they do (the ones they never performed live with Freddie): Lambert’s range does justice to The Show Must Go On, These Are the Days of Our Lives is great on the B stage (but can’t they dig up some ‘new’ old footage for the backdrop?!), and, best of the lot, I Want It All. Crikey, that song sounds huge.
Another feature of the Queen + Adam Lambert experience is how some of the songs have lost their rockier edge. I noticed it first, I think, with Don’t Stop Me Now, which opened the ‘Rock Big Ben Live’ TV concert on New Year’s Eve 2014. The Live Killers version is a bit heavier – mainly the middle “Don’t stop me, don’t stop me…” bit just before the solo. But it is most apparent with Somebody to Love: compare the 2022 iteration with (say) the performance at Milton Keynes in 1982, coincidentally 40 years ago to the day that I am writing this.
Tie Your Mother Down – one of those songs that, though not a big hit and so left off Greatest Hits, has been played so often over the years that it’s almost unthinkable to leave it out now – and Radio Ga Ga have been shortened through the omission of a verse or two. A shame, though it’s certainly not a catastrophe on the scale of the Live Magic album (ugh – just to write the name is to shudder), and it makes room for an extra song or two, I suppose.
And what’s not there? We’re not going to get early classics like White Queen, Liar or Keep Yourself Alive (although I did wonder about the latter, given it featured in the Bohemian Rhapsody film, a prime source of Queen ‘knowledge’ for millions of new fans around the world). Given one pick, I would give Save Me an airing instead of Who Wants to Live Forever. It was actually the bigger hit of the two, in Britain at any rate.
I’m glad that I’m in Love with My Car is still there. It was always Roger’s moment in the spotlight and, with the inclusion of the final verse and the long outro on recent tours, it’s never sounded better. Now, of course, Roger is also on vocal duties on the B stage for These Are the Days of Our Lives and Under Pressure. That apart, he doesn’t try anything too elaborate these days and he is more than ably supported by Tyler Warren on percussion.
And then there’s the one and only Brian May. The Doc long ago cemented his place in my affections as favourite band member. My friend Thomas (much younger than me and very much not a Queen fan), who attended the following night, said that he had wondered beforehand whether it would all be a giant Brian May ego-fest. Well, it isn’t that but, not a little ironically, Brian is certainly the focal point for much of what happens on and off stage these days.
His recent health problems are no secret, and yet he seems to have phenomenal energy for someone fast approaching 75. If he’s not rushing up and down the catwalk, he’s striding back to his mic to contribute some backing vocals, or high above the stage to perform his long solo, or rushing off stage to reappear via a trapdoor somewhere a few seconds later. He also provides the show’s most intimate moments via his acoustic versions of Love of My Life and ’39. Cue shouts of “We love you, Brian!” and the magical smartphone light display. You’d have to be hard of heart not to be moved by that.
Watching some brief clips on Twitter in the last week I have been struck by how much Brian is clearly loving every moment of it all. It’s there in his face and in his playing, which seems to me to be as good as ever. And did I mention that guitar sound?
These days Bohemian Rhapsody ends the show proper: funnily enough, it never actually did on any of the original tours. The encore is, of course, We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions. And just like on all the previous Adam Lambert and Paul Rodgers tours, when Champions reaches its climax – that sublime, elongated, thunderous, guitar-heavy ending – I find myself wondering whether it is an ending of another kind as well and whether this is the final time we will hear it and Queen on anything like this scale again.
More about Queen
Queen Songs Ranked
Starting here, every Queen song ranked – plus an explanation of the rationale and ground rules I adopted
Looking Back at Live Killers
Reflections on Queen’s very first live album, 40-ish years after its release
My Queen Memories
Growing up as a Queen fan: teenage tales told through 10 Queen-related objects
Books, TV and Films, April 2022
4 April
When plans for the film Ammonite, about the nineteenth-century English fossil collector and palaeontologist Mary Anning, were announced, I assumed – wrongly, as it turns out – that it would concentrate on her struggles to be recognised for her expertise and pioneering work. In fact, other than brief scenes in the British Museum that top and tail the film – a new exhibit that makes no mention of Mary’s role in finding and identifying it – the emphasis is very much on her life in Lyme Regis and a love affair with Charlotte Murchison who, though wealthy and privileged, is trapped in a stifling, loveless marriage.
It’s hard to go wrong with a cast that includes Kate Winslett, the ever-wonderful Saoirse Ronan and Fiona Shaw. Perhaps there could have been more of a focus on Anning’s palaeontological work. On the other hand, Ammonite convincingly depicts the squalid living conditions endured by the vast majority of people in the nineteenth century and their desperate lives of struggle, toil and heartbreak, with many (women especially) starved of emotional and intellectual as well as physical nourishment. Mary’s mother – with whom she lives – is obsessed with cleaning eight animal figurines: we learn that they represent her dead children.
I dug a bit deeper into Mary’s life story after watching the film. It seems that – unlike the portrayal of her in Ammonite – it is not certain that she was a lesbian. I have written here some thoughts about ‘fake’ history and film.
Ammonite was one of two films about pioneering nineteenth-century women that I watched this month – the other being Miss Marx. The eponymous Miss Marx is Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx and herself a revolutionary socialist. Much of the film is set in the drawing rooms of relatively wealthy socialist campaigners and left-wing intellectuals; their middle-class comforts and bohemian lifestyles are a world apart from the lives led by the likes of Mary Anning. Miss Marx is the story of Eleanor continuing the work of her father, in particular by active involvement in workers’ struggles and in promoting women’s rights. Her commitment to her father’s ideas is shown via (short) straight-to-camera political monologues – not the only strikingly unusual directorial touch.
The film delivers two emotional punches. The first – more of a relentless pummelling of the ribs than an upper cut to the chin – is Eleanor’s long-term relationship with fellow socialist Edward Aveling, who is both hopelessly profligate with money, wasting the legacy left to her by family friend Friedrich Engels, and emotionally and sexually unfaithful to Eleanor (to the extent that he secretly married another woman using a pen name). The second is the discovery – shown here as a death-bed admission by Engels – that her father was the unacknowledged father of Freddy, the child of the Marx family’s long-time housekeeper Helene.
It’s all very mainstream and conventional. But, of course, Eleanor Marx was not at all mainstream and conventional by the standards of the time, and so director Susanna Nicchiarelli makes a valiant attempt to capture and convey Eleanor’s free spirit. The opening credits are the first clue – all flashing images and raucous music, not perhaps the first things we associate with Eleanor Marx. It is the final moments of the film, though, that offer up a real taste of Eleanor’s bohemian sensibilities: a drugged-up freak-out – or is it a meltdown? – to the accompaniment (again) of a punk rock soundtrack.
12 April
I have been slowly working my way through Simon Heffer’s Simply English: An A to Z of Avoidable Errors. As I wrote in the introduction to my free-to-download style guide, there is no one definitive set of rules governing the use of English. There are, of course, many ‘rules’ that are more or less universally accepted. But there is also a large and expanding grey area about which there is much less agreement.
Hence the large number of style guides and books – and websites these days – about the use of English. Each reflects the approach to writing English and even something of the personality of the particular writer or organisation. I enjoyed Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style and, even more so, Gyles Brandreth’s Have You Eaten Grandma – the latter probably the best book for anyone who wants a funny and accessible introduction to writing well, or at least accurately.
I really shouldn’t like Simon Heffer – but I do. He is a historian and a political commentator, very much on the right politically. Something of a big beast in the Tory world, he has had long spells at the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. His books include a very good (but inordinately long and detailed) biography of Enoch Powell. Much the same could be said about his book High Minds, which I read recently. His first book on grammar and the use of English – called Strictly English – came about after emails sent by Heffer to colleagues at the Telegraph pointing out errors in their writing appeared on the internet. Yes, you get the picture.
There is actually much to admire in Heffer’s advice. He has no time for writing that he considers overinflated, pretentious or affected, and he emphasises the importance of writing clearly and plainly. He hates clichés, the use of which displays “a paucity of original thought”. On the other hand, it’s not hard to guess what his view is of what he calls ‘political correctness’ and I quickly lost track of the number of times he uses words like ‘ignorant’ or ‘barbaric’ in his A–Z. Language does evolve; that’s a simple fact. And so it was interesting to note the (many) examples of things Heffer says are just plain wrong that are nevertheless listed in Lexico, Oxford’s online dictionary, as legitimate (or at least widely accepted) uses of English.
This is typical of Heffer’s approach – part of the entry for Clergy, writing to or addressing:
The Reverend John Smith or the Reverend Mary Smith is correct. The Reverend Smith is not. His or her Christian name [Christian name, note, not forename, given name or first name], or rank, is required …The Reverend Smith is the product of that most God-fearing of countries, America, but is an abomination here.
from Simply English: An A to Z of Avoidable Error by Simon Heffer
I looked up ‘abomination’ to check the literal meaning: it is ‘a thing that causes disgust or loathing’. Again, you get the picture.
19 April
I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Old Henry – a tough and gritty western. Like The Homesman – which I discussed here – and a 2017 film starring Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike called Hostiles, it offers what we might call a ‘revisionist’ or ‘realist’ representation of the American West. Old Henry depicts a bleak, unforgiving and frequently unpleasant world. This is the reality of rugged individualism. The West is a violent place, with the law often far away. Guns are a part of everyday life but – and this is what I particularly like about these revisionist films – most of the people who fire them aren’t good shots. They’re not marksmen. Most of their bullets miss their target. When they do hit someone, it hurts and causes a bloody mess. As I said about The Homesman, these films aren’t like the sanitised westerns on which my generation grew up.
Contrast that with 2 Guns. Any film described as ‘buddy cop action comedy’ should carry a health warning: ‘Do yourself a favour and watch Lethal Weapon instead’. Predictable, stale, unoriginal: the only thing bigger than the body count was the cliché count. Even Denzil Washington couldn’t make it enjoyable to watch.
The bad guys are bad. The good guys are stand-up comedians. And everybody is a tough guy. There are firefights aplenty, naturally. And, of course, the bad guys never hit their target and the good guys never miss theirs. In fact, bullets don’t really hurt – the good guys even shoot themselves for laughs and presumably because bad-guy bullets bounce off them.
It’s possible that there is a slow-motion shot of a good guy walking nonchalantly away from an exploding building. It’s also possible that I fell asleep and dreamt that particular scene.
23 April
Going back a couple of years or so, I really enjoyed the 2017 film The Man with the Iron Heart, about the assassination of the fanatical and ruthless Nazi Reinhard Heydrich during the Second World War. He was killed in Prague in 1942 when he was governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In retaliation, the Germans razed the village of Lidice. Operation Daybreak is an earlier film of the same events – it was made in 1975 – and features a very young-looking Martin Shaw as one of the assassins (though he was actually 30 at the time). Anton Diffring plays Heydrich: as a blond-haired, blue-eyed actor, Diffring was a staple of Second World War films of the 60s and 70s – The Colditz Story and Where Eagles Dare, to name but two.
Once again – see my comments on Ammonite above – there is a question mark with Operation Daybreak concerning its historical accuracy: for example, the film gives the clear impression that this was a British-planned operation whereas in fact the British Special Operations Executive played more of a supportive role. I keep asking myself: does it matter and does it make the film any less good?
28 April
‘Magisterial’. A seriously overused word, a favourite of non-fiction book reviewers and frequently used in puff-quotes that publishers splash across book covers to entice the reader. And here it is again, used to describe On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present by Alan Ryan. ‘Magisterial’ comes from the Latin ‘magister’, meaning teacher or schoolmaster, and means ‘having or showing great authority’. It’s right up there with ‘authoritative’ and ‘definitive’ in my if-I-ever-see-this-word-again-it-will-be-too-soon list.
That’s not to say that On Politics isn’t written with great authority. Alan Ryan is a Fellow of the British Academy who has spent a lifetime working at the world’s top universities. Still, even a thousand-page book can only scratch the surface of such a vast topic as the history of political thought so, other than ‘we can trust Ryan’s analysis and judgements because he knows what he’s talking about’, I’m not really sure what ‘magisterial’ really means here.
In recommending the OUP ‘A very short introduction to…’ book series, Ryan describes the chapters of his own book as ‘very very short introductions’. Other than the final hundred or so pages, On Politics is made up of chapters that focus on the big hitters who have contributed to the development of political thought in the West – from the ancient world to the end of the nineteenth century. The final few chapters, by contrast, are thematic, focusing on topics such as imperialism and nationalism, socialism and democracy.
Most chapters are arranged in the same way – usually starting with a ‘life and times’ section, for example. In a book of this length it’s no real surprise that sentences like this crop up now and again: “…a string of articles in the 1930s criticised Dewey from the standpoint of a more Augustinian standpoint.” There are also phrases and even more or less whole sentences that turn up more than once within a few pages of each other.
More disconcerting – especially for a book with the word ‘magisterial’ on its cover – are the factual howlers, which are particularly noticeable in the sections relating to Russian history. There is a reference to the end of serfdom in 1862, for example; it was 1861. Ryan also writes about a Russian translation of Das Kapital in 1867 and the despotic near-theocracy over which Alexander III then ruled: Das Kapital was published in 1867 but the first Russian edition only appeared in 1872 and Alexander III didn’t become tsar until 1881. Later there is a comment that Lenin was wounded by a would-be assassin in 1922, two years before his death. In fact, the assassination attempt, by Fanny Kaplan, was in 1918; it was a stroke that severely debilitated Lenin in 1922.
It’s easy to pick holes. Everyone makes mistakes. In the grand scheme of things these are minor errors. It’s a massive book and mistakes are bound to slip through. All true. It’s just that I always find myself thinking: if these are errors that I have spotted because I know a bit about the topic, what errors are there in the sections I am not familiar with?
Anyway, putting these minor mistakes to one side, On Politics is a book I enjoyed reading from cover to cover – I spent most of the month on it – and one that I have no doubt I will be dipping into regularly in future. I found the chapters relating to the Middle Ages particularly illuminating.
30 April
Just time to read In Between the Sheets, a (short) collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. I love The Cement Garden, his first novel, published at roughly the same time. McEwan’s early stuff reminds me of the David Lynch film Blue Velvet, the opening shot of which establishes an everyday scene in smalltown America before zooming in on a bloody, rotting amputated ear lying in the grass. McEwan seems to focus in on the out-of-place, the bizarre, the outlandish, the extraordinary amidst the ordinary – people, scenes and situations that once upon a time might have been described as ‘freakish’.
Two Fragments, for example, is set in a post-apocalyptic London. In the first ‘fragment’ a father and his young daughter watch as a girl stabs herself through the stomach with a sword, her father passing round a collecting tin to the watching crowd, claiming that she will perform the feat without drawing blood. In Dead as They Come, a man falls in love with a mannequin, buys it from the shop and takes it home to live with it. Oddly enough, their relationship doesn’t last.
As I say, this is early McEwan – and he certainly seems to be experimenting with form. As a dabbler in fiction reading, I found some of them more accessible than others (which is another way of saying that I probably missed a great deal). To and Fro, to use another example, seems to be about a man lying in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about (a) where he is at that moment, his lover beside him, and then (b) an earlier office scene. The paragraphs alternate – to and fro – between the two situations.
Books, TV and Films, March 2022
9 March
I first became aware of Gyles Brandreth via his appearances on Channel 4’s Countdown in the early-ish eighties. Muddled memory confession time: I always thought of him as the second occupant of Dictionary Corner, following a lengthy Kenneth Williams residency, until I was reminded – I think after reading Richard Whiteley’s autobiography, Himoff! – of Ted Moult, who did a week or so at the very beginning.
I was in the sixth form at the time and Gyles was as passionate about words as my brilliant and somewhat eccentric Latin teacher, Eddie Scholes. They were both besotted with dictionaries (Countdown used the Concise Oxford, the one we had at home) and particularly the etymology of words.
Words. If there is one word that comes close to encapsulating or at least connecting the vast range of Gyles’ passions and pursuits, that’s perhaps the one. Words on the page. Words spoken. Wordplay. The after-dinner circuit. The Oxford Union. Awards ceremonies. Dictionaries. Novels. Diaries. Plays. The theatre. Radio. Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde. Jane Austen. Quotations. Anecdotes. Scrabble. Winnie the Pooh. Grammar, punctuation and the use of English…
…Writing a musical. Setting up the National Scrabble Championships. Writing a biography of Frank Richards (Billy Bunter’s creator). Pitching to revive Billy Bunter on TV. A one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe. A teddy bear museum…
The only word Gyles doesn’t seem to know is ‘stop’.
His recently published memoir, Odd Boy Out, was high up on the must-read list. I had thoroughly enjoyed both sets of Gyles’ published diaries. Something Sensational to Read in the Train runs from 1959, when he was at prep school, to the turn of the millennium. Breaking the Code, meanwhile, covers his years as an MP, including a period in the whips’ office, and is an excellent insider’s perspective on the 1992–97 Major government.
“Do forgive the occasional aside. I’ll try not to overdo it…” Yeah, right. Gyles is a wonderful raconteur and storyteller. He both speaks and writes beautifully – and he makes it all seem so effortless. And what’s more, none of it feels contrived. You can hear his voice on every page and believe that all these things really did happen to him, more or less as described. Odd Boy Out is often laugh-out-loud funny and wonderfully — shockingly — indiscreet.
In the prologue he unleashes a first-rate anecdote about the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and male strippers from the time he sat with them (TRHs – not the strippers) in the Royal Box at the Royal Variety Performance. Yes, really. On to some family history in chapter two (never my favourite bits of biographies and memoirs; I am hopeless with family trees) and suddenly the reader is knee-deep in a tale about Donald Sinden. And it doesn’t let up.
We are, he says, moulded by our parents. Are we surprised that Gyles loves anecdotes when his father “measured out his life” in anecdotes? Is it any wonder that he knew large chunks of Milton at the age of six when his father performed dramatic dialogues at his bedside while his mother read him nursery rhymes? Where Stuart Hall recoiled from the circumstances of his upbringing [see my review of Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger], Gyles embraced it all.
I always used to think of Gyles as quintessentially, comfortably, smugly middle class. It’s how he himself, in Odd Boy Out, characterises his upbringing. But it came at a cost — literally. There was never enough money. To quote Gyles, money worries wore his father down and then wore him away. Perhaps if the children hadn’t all gone off to boarding school (three to Cheltenham Ladies College and one to Bedales) or if the family hadn’t spent so much time in Harrods, things might have been different.
Gyles is a show-off, a showman and a shameless namedropper – the latter a reminder that he really has met just about everybody (there’s a nice recurring ‘I shook the hand that shook the hand…’ line). Although he doesn’t appear ever to have struggled to get mainstream media work – and is currently a regular on programmes like ITV’s This Morning and the BBC’s The One Show – I have no doubt that plenty of people dislike him intensely. The Times referred to him as “the Marmite of light entertainment”.
He can certainly do silly – he is something of an expert at standing on his head, a skill which he has demonstrated in some rather unlikely places. He’s a bit too full-on at times. And then there are the jumpers. It’s also a fairly safe bet that adjectives like smarmy, superior and too-clever-by-half have attached themselves to his name on a not infrequent basis over the years.
In Gyles’ defence it is something that he readily acknowledges. This is how Part 2 begins:
I realise now that I must have been a ghastly child. I was insufferable: precocious, pretentious, conceited, egotistical.
from Odd Boy Out by Gyles Brandreth
But one of the many joys of Odd Boy Out is that, as we turn the pages, we get to know the other Gyles, the one that doesn’t make an idiot of himself by wearing a silly jumper and standing on his head. So there is plenty of sadness, regret, guilt and self-criticism in these pages alongside the laughs, jokes and tall tales. And he’s the one tapping the keys on the final chapter, which takes the form of a letter to his late father and which movingly brings together the different strands of the story he has delighted us with over the preceding 400 pages.
Except, that’s not quite all. There’s a short epilogue, beginning with his wife Michèle knocking on the study door. How odd, because the prologue begins with his wife popping her head around the study door: “She never knocks. She likes to keep me on my toes.” Perhaps we can’t quite believe it all.
17 March
I was surprised by the number of swear words in Odd Boy Out, though any profanity is (almost?) invariably uttered by someone other than Gyles, usually as added spice in the many tasty anecdotes he serves up. Even the C-word makes an appearance or two – not something I imagine is heard very often on the This Morning sofa. It seems to be the insult of choice for the luvvie-darling set. Perhaps Shakespeare is at the root of this. See, for example, Act 3 Scene 2 of Hamlet in which the prince of Denmark, subjecting Ophelia to a fair amount of sexual innuendo, refers to “country matters”.
Why mention Hamlet? Because – after Odd Boy Out – where else but Shakespeare? If Gyles Brandreth can recite some of the great soliloquies à la Laurence Olivier before the age of ten, I can surely cope with a bit of Shakespeare.
I haven’t read much – Twelfth Night at school and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth more recently. The obvious stumbling-blocks are the archaic language and the many references to customs and contextual events that the modern reader is unlikely to be familiar with. My expert guide through Hamlet was the excellent Cambridge School Shakespeare series.
Its layout is reassuringly user-friendly. The text of the play is set out on the right-hand page of each double-page spread, and the notes appear on the facing page. Sandwiched between a short summary of the action and a glossary of tricky words and phrases is the editors’ input – a mix of explanation, thoughtful commentary and ideas for students (and actors) to help them further explore the various characters, issues and themes.
There are familiar phrases on virtually every page, of course – only some of which I was aware of as being Shakespearean in origin. Take “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”, from Act 1 Scene 4. It’s a ‘Bones’ line in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, by far the best of the original Star Trek films.
28 March
I think it was Alastair Campbell who said that when a new volume of his diaries came out the first thing that everyone did was turn to the index to read what he had written about them. Something similar probably happened after word spread about In the Thick of It, the diaries of ex-Conservative MP and government minister Sir Alan Duncan, published last year.
Duncan is brutal at times. To give just a flavour, Fiona Hill (adviser to the PM) is “mental”, Emily Thornberry is “a graceless frump” and Priti Patel is “a nothing person”. It is curiously reassuring that Duncan’s opinion of the talents of Patel and fellow Conservative Gavin Williamson is as low as mine. And it is safe to say that Tobias Ellwood (at the time a ministerial colleague of Duncan) will not have found these diaries a comfortable read.
The cut and thrust of politics, perhaps, though I was troubled by the number of times Duncan makes reference to someone’s physical appearance when insulting them. An irksome local party member is described as “the most ugly nasty shit in the Association”, and he calls the prominent Tory Eric Pickles a “fat lump”.
Such unpleasantness aside, the diaries are a great read, helped by the fact that Duncan can write a decent phrase – “a barrage of Farage”, “a relentless wankfest”. His is a semi-insider’s perspective on a key moment in modern British history. The diaries cover the period from the start of 2016 (the Brexit referendum was in June of that year) to the end of 2019, when the Conservatives led by Boris Johnson won the general election. Duncan was a self-styled “lifelong Eurosceptic” who plumped for Remain and then watched helplessly (despite – indeed, because of – his position as a Foreign Office minister) as the government made a total shambles of the Brexit process.
Diaries usually reveal much about the diarist. Duncan clearly has a high regard for himself, often despairing of those around him – see the Ellwood references – and there is an unspoken assumption that he himself could and would have done things better.
In his introduction Duncan makes the usual points about the value of diaries:
Journalism is often called the first draft of history, but a diary is a primary source. Whereas our newspapers express the nation’s prejudices, a diary can provide an unfiltered account of events. Assuming it is written up at the time, unvarnished and in the moment, it can capture the hardest thing for any historian to reconstruct – the feeling of the time, with all its uncertainties and lack of hindsight.
from In the Thick of It by Sir Alan Duncan
Absolutely, though of course the editing process – the deliberate choices over what to include and what to exclude from the published version – is itself a form of filtering, meaning that even ‘unvarnished’ diaries give us a partial and sometimes misleading representation of events.
Here’s an example relating to Boris Johnson, about whom Sir Alan has much to say. When Duncan was appointed to the Foreign Office by Theresa May in July 2016, Johnson was the foreign secretary, and therefore Duncan’s boss, until he (Johnson) resigned almost exactly two years later. Although the two men got on reasonably well during their time together, Duncan had little regard for Johnson’s abilities as a serious politician. He says this of Johnson – and plenty more besides – in his entry of 24 September 2017:
I have lost any respect for him. He is a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgement. He is an international stain on our reputation. He is a lonely, selfish, ill-disciplined, shambolic, shameless clot.
from In the Thick of It by Sir Alan Duncan
Following Johnson’s resignation in 2018, Duncan sees him as “a much reduced figure”, with little support in the parliamentary party. On Saturday 8 September Duncan tweeted that “this is the political end” for Johnson. Thereafter there are few mentions of him, other than for what Duncan calls his wrecking tactics, until we are well into 2019. Theresa May stepped down as prime minister in June and Johnson comfortably won the subsequent leadership election.
My point is not that Duncan was wrong in his 2018 judgement about Johnson’s future prospects but that – presumably as a result of the editing process – the diaries do not accurately reflect how support for Johnson subsequently grew to such an extent that, on 8 April, Duncan was warning his preferred candidate, Jeremy Hunt, “that if he doesn’t rev up his leadership efforts now he’ll never catch up.”
Books, TV and Films, February 2022
7 February
I have always been an occasional reader of historical fiction, though it hasn’t been a conscious choice until quite recently. I just seemed to naturally gravitate towards books that were set in the past. Does Sebastian Faulks write historical fiction? I don’t really think of him that way, and yet novels like Birdsong and Human Traces are wonderful examples of the genre.
Reading Hilary Mantel and then Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (I think in that order) was a revelation: fiction as an introduction to historical periods and events about which I knew little or nothing. In this case, medieval France. Mosse made it all wonderfully accessible. I remember being barely twenty pages in when a voice shouted at me from off the page: This is fantastic. Why have you never taken an interest before, you idiot?
I have written more about historical fiction in my review of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. And here’s my review of The Last Protector by Andrew Taylor.
I read The Burning Chambers, the first in a new multi-book epic tale by Mosse, in 2019. The City of Tears is the follow-up. The city in question is Amsterdam, home to refugees from far and wide, though much of the story actually hinges on events in Paris in August 1572 — the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The climax of the novel takes place on an island reliquary (a building that houses holy relics). Though complex religious and political divisions play a central role in proceedings, Mosse guides us expertly through them and at no point does the reader feel overwhelmed by complicated or unnecessary detail.
Mosse is also concerned with how we remember the past — not least the gaps and absences in the historical record. She is the founder director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the founder of the Woman in History campaign, so it is no surprise that the novel features a cast of strong female characters, none more so than Minou who, in addition to being wife and mother and châtelaine of the castle of Puivert, is also a chronicler:
Now writing was as necessary to her as breathing. A necessity, a responsibility. Her journals were no longer a history of her own hopes and fears, but rather the story of what it meant to be a refugee, a person displaced, a witness to the death of an old world and the birth of a new. Minou knew that it was only ever the lives of the kings and generals and popes which were recorded. Their prejudices, actions and ambitions were taken to be the only truth of history.
from Kate Mosse, The City of Tears
15 February
I like the first of the two Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films (the second not quite so much). However, fans of the books and — more importantly perhaps — Lee Child, who writes them, don’t. The actual Reacher character is (so people say — I don’t know) both a man-mountain and gruffly monosyllabic. Tom Cruise is neither. Child said that there’s wouldn’t be any more Cruise films and instead he has backed an Amazon reboot. It’s called Reacher, is made up of eight 50-ish-minute episodes and is based on the first novel (yes!), originally published in 1997. And it’s great. There are apparently some tweaks to bring it more up to date, but it certainly ticks the required man-mountain, gruffness and monosyllabism boxes.
19 February
Mike Rutherford’s The Living Years is the third (and best) Genesis memoir that I have read, the other two being Phil Collins’ Not Dead Yet and Steve Hackett’s A Genesis in My Bed. There’s also a heavyweight biography of Peter Gabriel that I haven’t got round to yet. Tony Banks has not (to my knowledge) published anything.
As I say, it’s the best of the bunch — certainly in quality terms. Rutherford is ex-public school, of course, so it’s reasonable to expect him to be able to string a few coherent sentences together. They’re all eminently readable and they all have good tales to tell but, compared to Hackett’s book in particular, Rutherford’s writing is much more organised and controlled. Where Steve assails the reader with exclamation marks and ellipses (…), Mike is considerably more reserved and understated, his line in humour deadpan and dry.
This is typical. It’s a description of Island Studios where the band were recording The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
There were two studios: a nice big one upstairs and a cheap, depressing one downstairs with chocolate-brown shagpile on the walls. We weren’t upstairs.
from Mike Rutherford, The Living Years
Ironically, at the foot of the page from which that quote comes (page 148) Mike uses an ellipsis — “but at that point I decided I needed some time out…” — but in this case I would say it’s warranted. It’s a nice way to lead into whatever the some-time-out stuff was.
The book’s title is of course a reference to the Mike + the Mechanics song about the death of a father. It’s a title well chosen. Mike’s at times difficult relationship with his father — a senior naval officer — is a thread that runs through the whole book. Extracts from his father’s unpublished memoirs (he died in 1986 but the memoirs were only discovered after Mike’s mother’s death in 1992 and were much later presented to Mike in bound form by his sons as a Christmas present, presumably the trigger for him to write these memoirs) crop up regularly, often judiciously chosen as counterpoints to Mike’s own career.
I liked the honesty in the book. At times, he can be quite cutting, not least about Genesis members past and present (though it may equally well just be his sense of humour). To take just two of many examples, we learn that Steve didn’t pay Mike and Phil for their contributions to Steve’s first solo album, and that Tony will never have a hit single because he “never did understand how to make words flow”. In fact, there are numerous barbs about Tony, presumably because they have known each other so long. “I think to this day Tony thinks his voice is better than it is” is one. Perhaps they are all in-jokes.
One thing that annoys me about celebrity biographies and memoirs is that the bulk of the material tends to be weighted towards the early years. Once the said performer(s) hit(s) the big time, the detail seems to thin out — as if it’s all in the public domain already or there isn’t really much of interest to tell. In Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of the Beatles we are told on page 178 of a 423-page book that Love Me Do (the first single) was released on 4 October 1962. We reach the first Smiths gig on page 149 of Johnny Rogan’s 303-page Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance.
(Note also how stars seem far more willing to write about the early years of grinding poverty — “I’ve paid my dues” — than about the years of fabulous wealth. One minute it’s all battered vans to gigs and poky hotel rooms and the next we’re headlining Knebworth.)
Rutherford’s book is for the most part more balanced than many I have read, though he says surprisingly little about Foxtrot — a big breakthrough album for Genesis — and Wind and Wuthering, which, along with Selling England by the Pound (an album Mike doesn’t hold in as high a regard as I do) is probably my favourite Genesis album.
And then suddenly it all peters out. Thirty pages from the end of the book and we have reached the Invisible Touch album and tour in 1986–87. It’s the band at the peak of their worldwide popularity. It’s also when Mike’s father died, and so it’s the memoir’s natural end-point, given the way that Mike has crafted it. But real life doesn’t follow artificial story arcs.
We get a handful of pages about the 1992 We Can’t Dance period. A whopping two paragraphs about Phil’s decision to leave. Ditto the Calling All Stations period with Ray Winston. Less than a page…really? Talk about damning with faint praise. A little bit (but not much) more than this about the 2007 Turn It On Again reunion tour. And, well, that’s it. A hugely anti-climactic feel at the end (not unlike the Abacab album which finishes with the underwhelming and downbeat Another Record).
27 February
Mention the name AJP Taylor and there’s a good chance that someone will talk about his TV lectures, done to camera in real time and without notes. It’s said that he could time the end of the lecture to the second. They were groundbreaking in their day, though most of his TV work was before I became interested in history. He was ill and frail by the time he came to record his final TV lectures, How Wars End, in 1985, which I watched while at university.
The first intellectual I remember seeing/hearing on TV was, I think, Professor Stuart Hall of the Open University. He was a mesmerising, wonderfully articulate public speaker. I first became aware of Hall via the iconic magazine Marxism Today. He and Eric Hobsbawm were both big-name regular contributors. Hall it is, I think, who coined the term ‘Thatcherism’. He certainly did much to define it.
Stuart Hall never wrote a book alone. Collaboration was for him, it seems, a key part of the creative and intellectual process. And so it is with his posthumously published memoir, Familiar Stranger, written “with Bill Schwarz”. I had assumed that Schwarz merely completed it after Hall’s death but, true to form, it had in fact started life as a dialogue between the two men. Only late in the day, we are told, was it decided to frame the memoir in the first person.
Other than for his interventions in British politics in the Seventies and Eighties, my knowledge of Hall comes from my interest in the formation and early years of the so-called New Left in the late Fifties. Familiar Stranger covers the years up to the early Sixties. It is primarily about the part of Hall’s life with which I am least familiar: his childhood in Jamaica (he was born in 1932) and then his arrival in England as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951 and his time at Oxford.
It is a compelling memoir. Despite — indeed because of — his relatively comfortable upbringing, he had a troubled and unhappy childhood. In his words it is a story of disavowal, disaffection and “deep-seated disorientation” as his awareness and understanding of class, racial identity and what he calls slavery’s “afterlives” and the “trauma of the slave past” develop.
Ideas and concepts that I associate with Hall and with cultural studies — the academic discipline he did much to pioneer — underpin the whole book. That, I guess, is the point. Hall was interested in how we relate to and make sense of the world around us. It makes for a stimulating though not always easy read.
Books, TV and Films, January 2022
4 January
Back to the wonderful world of historical fiction to welcome in the new year. I discovered Andrew Taylor last summer. His The Last Protector, set in Restoration England, is from his Marwood and Lovett series (I also now have The Ashes of London, the first of them). Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final part of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, still awaits, and her 800-page A Place of Greater Safety, set during the French Revolution, is also on this year’s reading list. The wonderful Kate Mosse also has her latest paperback out later this month, I think, the sequel to The Burning Chambers.
I keep mixing up SJ Parris and CJ Sansom. Similar names, similar covers, similar titles. I have already read Sacrilege by Parris but, as usual, I wanted to start at the beginning. Hence Heresy, the first in the Giordano Bruno series, set in Elizabethan England.
The prologue (the origin story of sorts) is actually set not in England but in Naples at the Monastery of San Domenico Maggiore. We meet Bruno in the privy, caught not quite with his pants down reading a copy of Erasmus’ Commentaries, which was on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He escapes just ahead of the arrival of the Father Inquisitor, whose verdict would not have been in any doubt. Seven years later, and now in England, Bruno is taken on by Sir Francis Walsingham as one of his vast network of spies working on behalf of the Elizabethan state.
Heresy has everything you would want and expect from great thriller writing: mystery, deceit, treachery — all set against a backdrop of the internecine religious struggles of the time. In short, the twists and turns are suitably tortuous, the pace utterly relentless and the thrills page-turningly thrilling. I read the second half of the book in a single day.
Any body of ideas — whether we’re talking religious beliefs, philosophical outlooks, economic theories or political ideologies, is likely to contain different strands and strains, quirks and nuances, practices and rituals. I was struck by the thought that Parris’ description of a secret mass at the dead of night could just as easily have come from the pages of a Dennis Wheatley black magic novel:
I found myself in a small room crowded with hooded figures who stood expectantly, heads bowed, all facing towards a makeshift altar at one end, where three wax candles burned cleanly in tall wrought silver holders before a dark wooden crucifix bearing a silver figure of Christ crucified.
from Heresy by SJ Parris
6 January
Four Lives was much-watch TV, the ‘based on a true story’ account of the murder of four young men by Stephen Port between June 2014 and September 2015. In each case Port administered fatal doses of the so-called ‘date rape’ drug GHB and dumped his victims’ bodies near his flat in Barking.
This wasn’t sensationalist or prurient TV. The focus was not on the actual murders or even on Port himself, but on the family and friends of each of the victims and the devastating impact the murders had on them. Sheridan Smith was excellent as the mother of the first victim, Anthony Walgate. Stephen Merchant was also terrific as Port. We are used to Merchant using his unusual physique for comic effect. Here he uses it to project utter creepiness. When Port removed his wig, I was immediately reminded of Richard Attenborough as John Christie in 10 Rillington Place.
Sadly, tragedies like this happen all too often. What sets the Port murders apart, however, are the actions and behaviour of the police. The response of the family liaison officer to a mother frustrated by the lack of progress or even of information — along the lines of ‘This is my first case, but I have done the training’ — might initially strike the viewer as bad writing until you realise that the police’s catalogue of cock-ups really is jaw-dropping. An inquest jury found just last month that fundamental failings by the Met “probably” contributed to three of the four deaths.
7 January
So sad to hear of the death of Sidney Poitier. Two of his films had a massive influence on me, growing up. In the Heat of the Night was probably the first film I ever saw that dealt with racism. And To Sir, with Love remains in my top 5 all-time favourites. The theme song (sung by Lulu, of course, who was in the film) is wonderful. A number one in the USA, but only a b-side in this country. Unbelievable!
8 January
On the subject of cock-ups, a book that I am surprised doesn’t get more mentions is The Blunders of Our Governments by the political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, who once upon a time were regulars on late-night by-election specials on TV. Published in 2013, it took a close-up look at some of the governmental howlers of modern times and at the flaws and failings of our political system which allow such gargantuan errors to occur.
I am not sure what I was expecting before I read Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman — a right-wing, populist-flavoured hatchet job on our MPs, perhaps (Hardman writes for the Spectator). I was agreeably surprised, then, that it was clear before I had even finished the preface that Hardman believes that the vast majority of MPs, of all political parties, are not selfish, venal or lazy, and milking the system for their own benefit. Most of them — she and I agree — are there for the right reasons: they work hard and want to improve their constituents’ lives. It is the political system that is flawed. This is a book about structures and culture: it is those that urgently need to be reformed.
The book opens with a couple of chapters on the eye-watering costs — both personal and financial — of even becoming an MP. Who on earth, I ask myself, would want to bother? Most of the book then focuses on what happens within parliament and government. There are just so many things that need to be modernised, that leave the whole process open to ridicule, or that are just plain wrong.
Here are just a few: the fact that an MP following their principles when it entails defying the party whip is potential career suicide; the fact that ministers are reshuffled so often that they have little chance of really getting to grips with the issues before they are moved on (eight housing ministers in nine years is a statistic I have seen more than once); the fact that it’s often the ‘noisy’ ministers — not the talented ones — who get promoted.
Most eye-opening for me was Hardman’s description of the committee stage of a bill. In theory, it is the part of the law-making process where political partisanship takes second place to a disinterested line-by-line consideration of the bill on its merits. In reality, says Hardman, members of the committee are chosen by the whips and it is well known as “an opportunity to write Christmas cards while paying little heed to the arguments being presented”.
The fundamental problem — the key structural issue not just with parliament but with democracy itself — is, as she says, that politicians have to be both “policy fixers and political winners”. Those two aims are often in conflict — as the politics of climate change reveals all too clearly. How likely are politicians to introduce policies that will cause significant upheaval to people’s lives and involve raising taxes when the benefits will only be felt in the medium term — and in fact may only be noticeable by their absence? Put it another way: was the widely predicted meltdown that would result from the millennium bug avoided because of timely pre-emptive action or was the threat it posed massively overhyped?
Hardman is particularly good on the political sleight-of-hand that occurs when politicians claim to be ‘taking the politics out’ of an issue — in reality, avoiding something that will upset a significant tranche of voters and thereby abdicating responsibility, often by passing it to a commission of enquiry of some sort.
She ends with a couple of suggestions for change, the best of which involves a beefed-up role for select committees. Alas, changing a deeply rooted culture is far easier said than done. I remember the talk in the Commons after the death of John Smith in 1994 of how we needed to take the bile and bitterness out of political discourse. It didn’t last. It never does. Just look at the political headlines over the last few weeks. When our current prime minister offered an apology to the House of Commons recently, he couldn’t even do humility for ten minutes before throwing a pathetic slur about the failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile across the despatch box.
11 January
Having discovered Nicola Walker in Spooks and been totally wowed by her in Unforgotten, I made a point of recording Annika, a crime drama shown recently on the cable channel Alibi. She plays a detective inspector, busy negotiating the ups and downs of personal and professional relationships after taking up a new post. Walker is fab, using the excellent breaking-the-fourth-wall script (you can tell it started life on radio) to make the most of her quirky but sharp character. Annika also takes top prize for — especially in these days of endless cutbacks, reorganisations and amalgamations — most unlikely police unit: the Glasgow Marine Homicide Unit.
14 January
I used enforced Covid isolation over the new year to re-watch all the Harry Potter films. I had forgotten how good they are — too long, but good. The (then) child actors were exceptionally well chosen. In the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, they are believable; by the third in the series, now probably mid-teens, they are very good.
28 January
Marc Morris tells us in his book The Anglo-Saxons that the response of King Æthelred to renewed Viking attacks on England in the early eleventh century was to issue an edict requiring all his subjects to participate in a national act of penance, including fasting for three days and processing barefoot to church accompanied by priests carrying holy relics.
To modern ears it doesn’t sound like much of a defence strategy. As hard as I try, I find it difficult to grasp how the world must have appeared to the medieval mind: in thrall to a God who was clearly not just omniscient and omnipotent but also vain and vindictive, uncaring and judgemental.
If the stranglehold of religion on the popular imagination was not quite so total by the mid nineteenth century, it still exerted a powerful grip on some of the finest minds and elite institutions — not least the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where academic advancement was shut off to anyone but card-carrying members of the Church of England. Theological disputes that seem (to me, anyway) obscure and esoteric derailed many a promising career.
At least that’s the impression I get from reading the opening chapters of High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain, Simon Heffer’s account of the social, cultural and intellectual life of Britain between c1840 and c1880. Elsewhere, it’s like listening to an episode of Radio 4’s The Long View, the programme that looks at stories from the past in the light of current events.
He tells the story, for example, of the preparations for the Great Exhibition of 1851, reminding me not so much of the Queen’s upcoming platinum jubilee (details of which have just been announced) as the origins and development of the Millennium Dome project, which I assume will feature prominently in Volume II of the Alastair Campbell Diaries.
The Great Exhibition and the Albert Memorial projects between them take up nearly 100 pages. High Minds is a big, weighty and demanding book, not helped by the fact that Heffer includes far too much extraneous detail, not least about the course of parliamentary debates: back then individual speeches often lasted for hours and debates for days.
The chapter on the ‘heroic mind’, for example, makes interesting points about a Victorian cult of the dead and about architectural tastes, but these struggle to breathe, suffocated by all the detail about the tortuous negotiations concerning the proposed Albert Memorial. Heffer frequently quotes at length, a practice not helped by the fact that the Victorians favoured an exhausting and sometimes baffling let’s-use-fifteen-words-where-five-will-do style in both speech and writing.
A recent letter in the Guardian objected to the use of the soubriquet ‘Member for the Eighteenth Century’ to describe the government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, on the grounds that the eighteenth century was an age of enlightenment, “with a long list of luminaries whose names have become bywords for the possibilities of the thinking and endeavour of which humans are capable”. As Heffer shows, the nineteenth century was similarly full of ‘high minds’.
Equally, however, it was a time of the most appalling snobbery, bigotry and downright cruelty. Take Stafford Northcote, for example, a man whose name is forever associated with groundbreaking and far-sighted reform of the civil service. He said this about the Irish potato famine (the relief efforts for which he was involved in):
…[a] mechanism for reducing surplus population … the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.
quoted from High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain by Simon Heffer (p472)
And, as with Peter Ackroyd’s description of Winston Churchill, it is impossible to read Heffer’s description of Benjamin Disraeli and not imagine that he had the current prime minister in mind when he wrote it. It is telling that, in his evaluations of the two titans Gladstone and Disraeli, the arch Conservative Heffer is so full of admiration for the former (a liberal) and so scathing about the latter.
Here’s a flavour from page 269:
The two men exemplify the Victorian political mind at its best and worst: Gladstone the man of principle, even if he had to engage in occasional contortions to try to remain principled; and Disraeli the opportunist, craving power for its own sake and not because of any great strategy to transform Britain and … willing to throw away any principle in order to stay in office.
quoted from High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain by Simon Heffer
Books, TV and Films, December 2021
6 December
My Inspector Rebus reading journey has arrived at The Hanging Garden, originally published in 1998 and the final part of a three-book omnibus edition called The Lost Years.
The main plot line concerns an ugly turf war between rival gangsters. Hello again, ‘Big Ger’. One of the great things about following the Rebus trail is the cast of recurring characters. Big Ger is still doing time and his ascendancy is threatened by the not-at-all-pleasant Tommy Telford. Rankin takes us to even uglier places than usual (and not in a sightseeing sense) and the book doesn’t pull its punches in its portrayal of graphic violence, including the torture of Rebus himself. There is also a nice Brian de Palma, Untouchables-esque set piece involving a planned armed raid on a top-secret pharmaceutical factory.
As ever, there are several sub-plots in play — here involving Nazi war crimes in France, the Bosnian and Chechen conflicts (major news stories at the time Rankin was writing) and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Atrocity is the underpinning theme, and Rankin wrestles with questions about how we reconstruct the past and the extent to which time can wash away responsibility for crimes and misdemeanours committed long ago.
Rankin uses Rebus’ strained relationship with his brother (brought together by a hit-and-run involving Rebus’ daughter) not just to add depth to the backstory but also to probe into the relationship between history and memory. Brother Mickey shows Rebus his collection of old postcards and photographs sent to him by Rebus during the latter’s time in the British army — extant documents, ‘proof’, it seems, of a happy and carefree younger life.
And here were these postcards, here was the image of Rebus’s past life that Mickey had lived with these past twenty-odd years.
from Ian Rankin, The Hanging Garden
And it was all a lie.
Or was it? Where did the reality lie, other than in Rebus’s own head? The postcards were fake documents, but they were also the only ones in existence. There was nothing to contradict them, nothing except Rebus’s word. It was the same with the Rat Line, the same with Joseph Lintz’s story.
Click here for my comments on Black & Blue.
Click here for my comments on Let It Bleed.
12 December
Questions of truth and accuracy are also very much at the heart of The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination by Richard J Evans. Regular readers will know how much I admire Evans. Comparing him with the historian Peter Padfield, I have written that Evans “is opinionated, frank (read his obituary of Norman Stone) but also authoritative. Unlike with Padfield, the reader feels in safe hands, confident that the text distils knowledge and understanding built up over a lifetime of study.”
The book is organised around five topics: the notorious antisemitic publication called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the stab-in-the-back myth after 1918; the Reichstag Fire in 1933; Rudolf Hess’ flight to Britain in 1941; and the fate of Hitler in 1945.
For those with knowledge of the Nazi period, these are all well-known issues and ‘mysteries’ — indeed, the final chapter about what happened to Hitler is so much a staple of modern culture that it is probably familiar even to those with little or no knowledge of German history — and Evans deals with them all in his usual thorough and judicious way.
For me the most interesting parts of the book were the bits in which Evans draws out more general lessons about what he terms ‘the paranoid imagination’ — conspiracy theories and ‘conspiracists’ (ie people who believe in a conspiracy theory or theories and not to be confused with ‘conspirators’, people engaged in a conspiracy).
He talks, for example, of a widespread refusal to recognise reality. This is not as ridiculous as it first sounds, when the very idea of objective facts and empirical verification is under sustained assault: consider the fact that vast numbers of Americans still refuse to accept that Joe Biden won the presidential election in 2020. What matters in the paranoid imagination is not whether the facts themselves are true but the ‘essential truth’ that lies beneath. Again, if that sounds absurd, consider an article written by the Daily Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey about the BBC in December 2021 in which she introduced an anecdote with the words: “This might not be true but it certainly is believable.”
In the interests of clarity, the quote is from a tweet in reply to Tominey from the BBC’s Nick Robinson, a presenter on the Today programme (and someone, incidentally, with a background in Conservative politics). The Telegraph article itself is behind a paywall and the only such freely visible phrase is “It may be apocryphal but it is a story worth telling anyway.” Either the previously quoted words appear behind the paywall or the sentence itself has been amended. Robinson’s tweet says:
Today we learned that you don’t think facts should get in the way of attacking the BBC. You start by saying so: “This might not be true but it certainly is believable”. You say Today cancelled an interview with John Redwood. Listeners heard him in our most prominent slot at 810 [sic]
A tweet from Today presenter Nick Robinson in reply to Camilla Tominey
These and other lessons that Evans draws — another is how myths become so embedded that they can no longer be discredited by facts and morph into unchallengeable truths — are as pertinent in the modern day as they are to the student of Nazi Germany.
Click here for my comments on Peter Oborne’s book The Assault on Truth.
17 December
And what happens when we have mere scraps of evidence about events in the past, especially when the history in question is particularly contested and entangled with fundamental questions of identity and culture — the foundation of a nation, for example?
Our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons must ultimately rest on the historical sources, but for most of the period these are extremely meagre. For the first two centuries after the end of Roman rule, we have virtually no written records of any kind, and are almost entirely reliant on archaeology. The situation improves as the period progresses … but there are still huge gaps in our knowledge.
from Marc Morris, The Anglo-Saxons
About ten years ago, determined to educate myself about the period of history I then referred to dismissively as the Dark Ages, I came out of Waterstones with a copy of a paperback brick called Anglo-Saxon England by Frank Stenton. I am guessing that it was the only such general history on the shelf because — caveat emptor! — I foolishly bought it based on little more than a glance at the puff-quotes on the cover. Alas, it did not take long to twig that this was not just a rather worthy old book, published in 1943, but the relevant volume in the venerable but decidedly creaky Oxford History of England series. (AJP Taylor’s wonderful but very dated English History 1914–1945 is part of the same series.)
That’s why I love books like The Anglo-Saxons, written by Marc Morris and published just a few months ago. Morris is another of a group of eminently readable historians I wrote about when discussing Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones. The Anglo-Saxons is an excellent introduction to this period of English history and doesn’t require any prior specialist knowledge or skills beyond an ability to keep track of (or, in my case, note down) the neverending list of people whose names begin with ‘Ælf-‘ and ‘Æthel-‘.
Morris provides an excellent insight into how historians work and the judgements they make. Take the chapter about Offa, for example, the eighth-century Mercian king. Within the space of a few pages we read numerous phrases along the lines of: “He claimed … but this may have been just a fiction to boost his credentials”; “Given that … Offa must have been…”; “It looks as if…”; “The outcome of the battle is not recorded, but it was almost certainly a defeat for Offa…”; ‘Other sources suggest that…”
Morris introduces us to the main historical themes and issues relating to the period, where current research is at and how historians’ thinking has evolved. We repeatedly meet statements saying something like ‘Historians generally used to think that … but now…’. For example, he guides us through the question of who was actually responsible for building Offa’s Dyke, the reasons why it was constructed, how it might have been done and how long it would have taken. We learn that an extensive investigation of the earthwork between the 1970s and the early 2000s concluded that Offa’s Dyke was not nearly as long as had always been assumed and that it did not in fact run from sea to sea, as Asser (a ninth-century bishop who wrote a life of King Alfred) had written. Then we learn that this new interpretation “has lately been called into question” and that Bishop Asser may have been right all along.
And then there is the discussion of Alfred the Great, co-opted in recent years as a figure central to English identity, the hero-king who drove the Vikings into the sea and created the English nation (and burned the cakes). Again, the actual picture is much less clear. The myth of ‘Alfred the Great’ was an invention of the eighteenth century: “attitudes that were deemed praiseworthy and patriotic in the Georgian and Victorian eras were being projected back onto a distant ninth-century king.” The first surviving record of the appellation ‘Great’ is not until the thirteenth century (unlike the mighty Charlemagne who was ‘the Great’ in his own lifetime). He almost certainly didn’t burn any cakes either.
Rather like well-written historical fiction, though for different reasons, books like The Anglo-Saxons are a gateway to more serious study of a historical topic, theme or period. Now I feel ready to tackle Stenton afresh.
Click here for my comments on Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones.
27 December
Mark Blake has written the most accurate and complete full-length book about Queen, and so — with reservations — I picked his new Magnifico! The A to Z of Queen off the Asda shelves just before Christmas.
Inside are 132 headings, packed with overviews, facts and anecdotes. Blake has spent much of his professional life writing about Queen, so the guy knows his stuff. But the stuff in this case generally reflects a book aimed squarely at the Christmas market and not at the hardcore fan. The emphasis is very much on the sensational, the ridiculous and the outré. This is a Queen A–Z viewed through a tabloid prism.
Where, for example, more serious publications might tease the reader with vague allusions to the supposed goings-on at the legendary [sic] New Orleans party to promote the Jazz album, Blake gives it to us straight. The stories of dwarves and cocaine are just the start: “Another unsubstantiated rumour claimed an auditionee [to be an act at the party] offered to decapitate herself with a chainsaw for $100,000 — presumably she would have to have been paid up front.”
There’s good stuff to be found (I didn’t know, for example, that the vocal effect on Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon was created by a microphone fed through headphones wedged inside a tin can), but there is also no shortage of pointless trivia. Do I really need to know what Belouis Some, who opened the bill at Knebworth in 1986 — Did he? I don’t remember that! — is doing now or what his favourite Queen song is? And do we really need three pages on ‘Jesus’ aka William Jellett, apparently a regular gig-goer over the last fifty years.
It’s a filthy habit but I can’t help enjoying finding inaccuracies in ‘encyclopaedic’ books such as this. It’s a fair bet that Magnifico! is not a book Blake has taken years working on, which would explain most of the obvious errors (references to the Wembley shows in June ’86; Christmas Day 1991 being three months after Freddie’s death; Live Aid on 15 July; ‘quality over quantity’ in the Made in Heaven entry, when presumably the author means the opposite). More puzzling is a reference to You’re My Best Friend being the band’s first American top-twenty hit: clearly it wasn’t — Bohemian Rhapsody…doh — a fact confirmed by the author himself three pages later.
I have written in more detail here about books about Queen and Freddie Mercury.
30 December
More next month but I am using enforced Covid isolation over the post-Christmas week to re-watch all the Harry Potter films. I had forgotten how good they are — overly long, but good. Top marks for the casting team: the child actors were exceptionally well chosen when they were a very young age. In the first film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, they are all convincing, despite presumably doing much of their work to blue screens and the like, and by the second film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, they are very good indeed.
Philadelphia 1983: Genesis Bootlegs
There’s no track on Genesis that I find weak.
It felt at times as though we were stretching the material as far as we could.
Hmmm. Both quotes come from the band’s official Chapter and Verse book. Both are attributed to Tony Banks. Although not directly contradictory, they point to a particular difficulty with appraising the album Genesis, the band’s follow-up to Abacab, released in October 1983. It consists (mainly) of well-crafted, radio-friendly pop-rock songs, but — ironically for an album called ‘Genesis’ by a band called ‘Genesis’ — is it really Genesis? Your answer will probably determine your view on the album and the subsequent Mama tour.
Mike Rutherford, in his 2014 autobiography, says that the original side one (ie the first three tracks, counting Home by the Sea and Second Home by the Sea as one track) is “pretty high on the list of the best things we’ve done”. Elsewhere he has described it as one of his favourite albums.
In my initial draft of this blog I wrote:
I would go along with Mike as far as saying that side one isn’t bad (rather like the Abacab album, in fact) but side two is a serious dip (again, like Abacab) and, overall, Genesis is, in my opinion, the band’s weakest — assuming that our album history begins with Trespass.
Today, well, I’m not so sure…
What is striking is how little coverage there is of the 1983–84 period. It merits maybe a single page in the Chapter and Verse book; the tour doesn’t even come up, if I remember correctly. When the Genesis era is discussed, the focus is usually on the making of the song Mama. My own view of Mama — indeed of the album as a whole — spins around like a weathervane in the wind. I was certainly intrigued by it at the time of its release, wondering whether (ie hoping that) Genesis were veering off in some wacky new direction. Nowadays I tend to dwell more on its structural similarity to In the Air Tonight.
Aah, Phil Collins. Like Chapter and Verse, Phil also gives the album roughly one page in his autobiography — part of a chapter called Hello I Must Be Busy. And therein, I suppose, lies the problem. By 1983 Phil’s solo career was starting to flourish on the back of a successful second album and another smash hit single, an excellent version of the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love. This was a pop star treadmill that was only getting faster. His outsized personality — perfectly in tune with the brashness of the Eighties — inevitably came to overshadow everything else, especially as Genesis’ music (augmented by Phil’s trademark gated drum sound) headed for ever more commercial waters.
Genesis was the first album written and recorded entirely at The Farm, the band’s new studio in Surrey. Hugh Padgham, he of the gated drum sound, was again the engineer, as well as earning a ‘with Hugh Padgham’ part-production credit. The name — Genesis — was chosen to signify that this was an album developed from start to finish completely together in the studio. Nobody turned up with anything pre-written. Ideas developed organically through playing around, often with new technology such as sampling synths and electronic drums, and everything is credited equally to Banks – Collins – Rutherford. The emphasis was on spontaneity and on quickly capturing an idea. There is more than an hour of officially released home video available for anyone with the patience to sit through it.
Having hated it at first, I have come to appreciate how the cover art for Abacab represents the music within — bold, brash, stark. Alas, the Genesis outer and inner sleeve artwork continues to leave me cold. Okay, the use of basic geometric shapes reflects the simpler, more commercial sound, but the concept’s very blandness (not to mention the dominant vomit-yellow colour) merely brings to mind the ‘pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap’ advertising campaigns favoured by your local Eighties discount store. And the mixture of uninspiring black-and-white photographs and pop art illustrations on the inner sleeve seems ill thought out.
Most of the lyrics have a similarly throwaway quality. Though there is nothing (thankfully) as literally nonsensical as the words of the song Abacab, nor is there anything that comes close to the depth, lyricism, wit or playfulness of the Genesis of old. Vacuous and inane, argues the prosecution. Direct and accessible, the defence counters.
True, Home by the Sea has an agreeably creepy quality and Silver Rainbow just about passes muster as a lyrical nod of sorts to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But lines like ‘Hold out, just keep on hoping against hope it’s gonna get better’ are just cringeworthy. The worst offender by far is Illegal Alien, a song (and video) whose tale of Mexican wannabe immigrants to the USA piles one unforgivable stereotype on top of another.
Genesis became the band’s biggest commercial success yet — Mike described it as the time being right for the band in the USA. And as the venues grew bigger and the live production expanded (with Tony’s keyboards moving stage centre, directly between the two drum kits), so the band’s sound and particularly Phil’s front-man persona became ever more assertive and direct.
This is the first tour since at least 1973 for which there is, to this writer’s knowledge, no high-quality bootleg of an entire show readily available. However, part of a Philadelphia show in November 1983 and an LA Forum show in January 1984 were subsequently broadcast on the radio, and there are several decent-quality audience recordings. There is also an officially released video — Genesis Live: The Mama Tour — which was recorded at the Birmingham NEC in February 1984 at the very end of the tour. Again, it is incomplete.
The setlist looked something like this:
Dodo/Lurker / Abacab / That’s All / Mama / Old Medley 1 / Illegal Alien / Man on the Corner / Who Dunnit? / Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea / Keep It Dark / It’s Gonna Get Better / Follow You Follow Me / Old Medley 2 / Drum Duet / Los Endos / Misunderstanding / Turn It On Again
Dodo/Lurker is a powerful opener — like Deep in the Motherlode, the stirring keyboard riff gives it a suitably epic feel — and is, as on the previous tour, immediately followed by Abacab. Two new songs follow, That’s All — “We’re called Genesis and we’re a country & western group” — and Mama. That’s All leads the way: it was a much bigger hit in the USA than Mama, reaching the Billboard top five. Most of the new album is included in the set, though not Just a Job to Do, the old side two’s best track.
The Mama tour also features not one but three medleys of older songs. The first — played early — appears to have been chopped and changed as the tour progressed. One of the first dates, Rosemont, Illinois, for example, begins with the introduction to Eleventh Earl of Mar, which then segues nicely to Squonk and then to Firth of Fifth. By the time we reach Oklahoma on 19 January 1984 Behind the Lines has replaced Squonk and the usual excerpt from The Musical Box has been added at the end. Other songs used at various stops along the way are Ripples and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
Three things shout out about the Oklahoma medley: (i) the Eleventh Earl of Mar intro sounds as haunting as ever, but the transition from Mar to Behind the Lines is jarringly clunky (ii) even as recent a song as Behind the Lines is now relegated to medley status (iii) Daryl Stuermer’s solo on Firth of Fifth is awful.
A suitably dodgy jacket and a ghettoblaster are Phil’s props to set up Illegal Alien (see the comments above — though, it should be noted, the band were obviously still enamoured enough of the song in 2000 to include the LA Forum recording on Genesis Archive #2: 1976–1992). It is, to these ears, the start of an undoubted mid-set dip: the forgettable Man on the Corner and execrable Who Dunnit? follow — though at some point on the tour they appear to have been dropped. Elsewhere, Keep It Dark and Follow You Follow Me, both less effective on stage than in the studio, remain in the set.
Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea is preceded by some new audience interaction schtick from Phil, which also develops as the tour progresses. Initially (in New York in November, for example) it is as basic as getting the crowd to wave their arms and make silly noises to get the lights to descend towards the stage. Soon, however, it has become an attempt to connect with “the other world” — a routine that will remain in the set until 1992.
The second medley is the familiar one, beginning with In the Cage. For this tour the Cage medley has been augmented with a harsh-sounding Eighties reinterpretation of In That Quiet Earth. Oddly, it is placed before rather than after the Slippermen solo, so, unlike on Wind and Wuthering, it doesn’t itself segue into Afterglow.
Dance on a Volcano has danced itself out for the time being, though the drum duet remains, setting up Los Endos to close the show in the time-honoured way. Misunderstanding, a lightweight, medium hit at best, is a puzzling choice for first encore. Turn It On Again follows as a second encore, mutating into yet another medley, this time a selection of classic pop hits of yesteryear, from Everybody Needs Somebody to Love and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction to Twist and Shout and In the Midnight Hour.
This final medley is — like the show as a whole — all very smoothly and professionally done, designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. As documented on the official tour video, the final medley at the Birmingham shows even included snippets of mainstream chart hits of the day, Karma Chameleon by Culture Club and Every Breath You Take by the Police.
And, well, that’s all for the Mama tour. In the UK there were a mere five shows, all in Birmingham, and nothing at all in the rest of Europe, Japan or elsewhere. Someone’s diary was obviously full. As the Mama tour ended, Phil brought out his Against All Odds single — the date obviously determined by the release date of the film from which it came. It became his biggest worldwide hit to date. The phenomenal success of 1985’s No Jacket Required confirmed him as a global pop superstar in his own right, his stature and ubiquity underlined by his appearance in both London and Philadelphia at Live Aid in July 1985. Genesis, meanwhile, were not involved in Live Aid.
What would they have played, one wonders?
More about Genesis
1978
And then there were three … plus two: the first tour without Steve Hackett
1980
Genesis, 1980 — and this time it’s personal. Reflections on the Duke era
1981
Tony, Mike and Phil, plus Hugh Padgham and that drum sound
Books, TV and Films, November 2021
7 November
Steve Hackett played guitar in the ‘classic’ Genesis line-up of the Seventies, of course. These days I count myself as a huge fan of his solo work too. I bought his (excellent) third album, Spectral Mornings, way back when it was first released in 1979, having been enchanted by the song Every Day. But I have only really got to know his solo stuff in the last few years, taking a chance on a 2017 album, The Night Siren, after which I picked up a cheap collection of five of his mid-career releases. His recent output — in terms of both quantity and quality — is phenomenal. In fact, unlike most late-in-their-career artists, he is currently producing the best music of his life.
Hackett has always been adept at channelling the many and varied cultural experiences and insights arising from his worldwide travels into both his music and lyrics, ably assisted by his (now) wife Jo. However, though his albums are always lyrically interesting, he isn’t a natural wordsmith — which is partly what makes A Genesis in My Bed, his 2020 autobiography, an uncomfortable read, for this fan anyway.
And that’s a shame — because he has an interesting story to tell, one that frankly I was not expecting. Periods of drink, drugs, and darkness and depression — who would have thought it of the bloke sitting quietly and undemonstratively stage-right on those early Genesis tours, shielded behind the heavy-rimmed glasses, the thick, black beard and the dark clothes. Steve’s choice of book title — a reference to, well, that would be telling — is in itself revealing.
The writing isn’t dreadful. Here’s his description of the postwar London of his childhood, for example:
Crumbling pillars adorned sad facades, appearing ripe for slum clearance. Together those houses resembled rows of rotting teeth with the odd gaping black hole of a bombsite to completely ruin any semblance of a smile.
from Steve Hackett, A Genesis in My Bed
However, in all likelihood the book is more or less a DIY effort — and it shows. We can forgive the occasional typo, tautology and other minor errors; I have yet to read a book that is completely error-free — and what I write certainly isn’t. It’s other stuff that is infuriating. The book cries out for a professional’s guiding hand. I can’t imagine for a moment that Steve would allow his music to be released without an appropriate level of quality control.
Exclamation marks litter almost every page! Paragraph after paragraph ends with the dreaded three dots, like a bad case of measles…
And then there is the constant metaphor overload. Take this run of sentences, for example:
A whole world of possibilities was revealing itself, starting as a trickle and becoming a flood. Once I’d opened Pandora’s Box there was no stopping me. During the tour, the ideas continued to germinate.
from Steve Hackett, A Genesis in My Bed
A good editor would also have helped organise the material: at one point he briefly covers the A Trick of the Tail period (an important moment, as it was the first album and tour without Peter Gabriel), then moves on to Wind and Wuthering, and then returns to discussing the A Trick of the Tail tour again.
As a Genesis fan, I was certainly interested to read his account of his years in the band, his decision to leave and his ongoing relationship with the remaining band members, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins. He clearly felt extremely close to Peter, the first of the classic line-up to fly the nest. The most barbed comment is aimed in Mike’s direction — he claims that in the 2014 Together and Apart BBC documentary Mike had asked for more focus on his own solo career at the expense of Steve’s — and he also makes clear that, though open to taking part in the 2007 reunion tour, an invite was never on the cards.
Another problem with the book is what is left out, relating to the years 1987 to 2007. We are informed in an afterword — presumably published only in the paperback edition and not in the original hardback — that his career “felt like swimming uphill and it was an emotionally traumatic period for me as well”. Why, then, write an autobiography, one wonders? There was also much, we are told, that he was not allowed to write about for legal reasons…
15 November
A quick burst of film-watching during the football break, featuring two actors whose films I always look out for. The first was Cold Pursuit, which stars Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman. It’s fair to say that Cold Pursuit left me, errm… cold. The father-out-for-revenge plotline obviously brings to mind the excellent Taken, but this time the setting is a ski resort in Colorado and his unusual skillset is the ability to drive a snow plough. If that sounds flippant, it’s in keeping with the film itself, with its Tarantino-esque mix of ultra-violence and cartoon comedy. It also has two seriously underwritten female roles — first, a new-on-the-block police officer and, second, Coxman’s wife. (What was the marvellous Laura Dern thinking when she took the role?!)
The Little Things was much better. There’s Denzil Washington, as watchable as always, and also Rami Malek, suitably enigmatic, like any self-respecting Bond villain should be. The story of a hunt for a serial killer covers not unfamiliar ground — slick, smooth and smart young high-flier meets (metaphorically) battered and bruised old hand with a dark secret to hide. With its shadowy settings and grizzly murders, there a definite noir-ish feel to it all, not least in the pleasingly ambiguous ending.
18 November
Unlike Steve Hackett, Peter Ackroyd certainly is a wordsmith — and as prodigious a writer as Steve is a musician. I have collected Ackroyd’s multi-volume history of England since picking up a copy of the first volume, Foundations, in a remaindered-books shop. In my review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now I credited Ackroyd with helping ignite my interest in the distant past, his felicitous prose “a sure guide through the byways of early England”. The sixth and final volume, Innovation, covers the twentieth century.
It is a tall order for a writer like Ackroyd to tell the story of the twentieth century in 460 pages. He has real literary flair — and not just in the sense that he writes exceptionally well. He is astonishingly well-read and clearly has deep literary and cultural sensibilities. It’s no surprise that the best sections of the book cover social, cultural and artistic themes.
His pen portraits are often a delight, he has an ear attuned for gossip and scandal, and his frequently acute observations come wrapped in nicely judged aperçus. How about this for a summary of suburbia: “This was the English family’s hallowed plot of land, the city dressed up in country clothes.” Or this, on the Church of England: “It is hardly coincidental that the Church’s reputation for gentle compromise arose just as its political influence began to falter.”
I think it is Steven Pinker (yes, him again), in his book A Sense of Style, who recommends that if you must use a cliché, at least do something with it. Give it a twist. Don’t just regurgitate it. Step up, Peter Ackroyd: “If India was the jewel in the diadem of empire, East Africa was the string of pearls binding it.”
This style doesn’t work quite so well when it comes to political history. Ackroyd isn’t a professional historian — he is described on Wikipedia as a biographer, novelist and critic — though much of his work is history-related. There is the odd slip-up (for example, referring to the February and November revolutions in Russia — it’s generally written as either February/October or March/November) and the acknowledgement of research help at the front of the book isn’t a feature of the preceding volumes. There are no footnotes to balance Ackroyd’s tendency to make sweeping generalisations. “The endless slaughter prompted English soldiers to ask why they were fighting” is one such example.
Here’s another:
At long last, the threat of Fascism was widely recognised. “We’ll have to stop him next time,” people commented in pubs across the country.
from Peter Ackroyd, The History of England Volume VI: Innovation
The multiplicity of events and developments, and sheer wealth of information out there, makes for some unusual subject choices. The world war bit of the Second World War whizzes by — barely has Hitler declared war on the USA than we’re celebrating VE Day — and yet he devotes several precious pages to the Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle in the Nineties. And I was astonished that, for someone with such cultural awareness and who has written on gay history, he makes just one (passing) reference to Aids.
More generally, the final third of the book — from, say, the early Seventies — drifts along without any sense of a unifying theme. (I am struggling, by the way, to understand why he has called this sixth volume ‘Innovation’.) The chapters seem suddenly to lose coherence and sense of direction — beyond the obvious chronological one. The text reads increasingly like a running commentary on events, stories that might have been worthy of a banner headline at the time but now seem no more than ephemera. Perhaps his assistants have been overzealous in their researches. Or perhaps, after six volumes, even the workaholic Ackroyd is tired. Who wouldn’t be?
I can’t put the book aside without highlighting this snippet of Ackroyd mischief:
According to the National Review, Churchill’s act of treachery [crossing the floor of the House to join the Liberal Party] was typical of “a soldier of fortune who has never pretended to be animated by any motive beyond a desire for his own advancement”. The accusation of egotism would be repeated throughout Churchill’s career, along with the related charges of political grandstanding and of an addiction to power. Civil servants complained that Churchill was unpunctual, prey to sudden enthusiasms, and enthralled by extravagant ideas and fine phrases. He was a free and fiery spirit who inspired admiration and mistrust in equal measure. Allies hailed him as a genius, while his enemies regarded him as unbalanced and unscrupulous.
from Peter Ackroyd, The History of England Volume VI: Innovation
Yes, you read that right. It says ‘Churchill’, not ‘Boris Johnson’ (who has of course written a biography of Churchill. Click to read the excoriating review by Richard Evans).
20 November
“I’m fighting a powerful impulse to beat the hell out of you.” It is a fairly safe bet that if they ever remake the film Marnie, this particular line of dialogue — said by Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) to the eponymous kleptomaniac, Margaret ‘Marnie’ Edgar (Tippi Hedren) — won’t make it into the revised script. It is by no means the only uncomfortable element of Alfred Hitchcock’s mid-Sixties psychological thriller. But times change and films are as valuable and revealing a source of information about the attitudes and manners of the day as, say, a novel.
Watching Marnie we see that the people making the decisions are male, the ones writing those decisions down are female. While wives dutifully look after the home and flaunt their jewellery on social occasions, husbands smoke cigars, drink whisky and talk business. When Marnie’s horse writhes around in pain following an accident and urgently needs to be put down, the manipulative sister-in-law begs to be allowed to ‘get one of the men’ to do it. And when Marnie refuses to have sex with Rutland on their honeymoon (after a marriage that she has been blackmailed into agreeing to), he takes what is ‘rightfully’ his anyway, despite promising that he wouldn’t.
23 November
Secret Army, currently showing on the Drama cable channel, is another TV series I have fond memories of from childhood. First shown in 1977, it tells the story of a resistance movement in German-occupied Belgium during the Second World War. ‘Lifeline’ helps Allied airmen, shot down by the Germans, get back to Britain.
In terms of production and feel, it has much in common with — though I don’t hold it in quite the same esteem as — the legendary series Colditz. Indeed, familiar faces crop up in both — most obviously Bernard Hepton. There is much that I would not have picked up on as a young child — for example, the tension between the Luftwaffe major, Erwin Brandt, and the fanatical Nazi, Gestapo Sturmbannführer Ludwig Kessler, who is despatched to Brussels to bolster efforts to close down the evasion line. “I am not a member of the Gestapo,” protests Major Brandt at one point. It brings to mind series two of Colditz, which introduced Major Mohn as a new second-in-command, a fanatical (though non-SS) former member of Hitler’s personal staff.
I doubtless missed at least some of the bleakness too: Yvette’s refusal to help a Jewish family in the episode Radishes with Butter (because Lifeline was not equipped to run Jews); the probable murder of an on-the-run British airman by Albert (because he might give away the organisation’s secrets if captured) in Sergeant on the Run.
A great series. Only one thing lets it down: its success spawned the truly awful ‘Allo ‘Allo! sitcom.
29 November
And finally this month, more magic from the wonderful Sebastian Faulks. Whenever I am asked about my favourite novel, I say Human Traces. It’s as good an answer as any. In addition to everything else I love about Faulks’ writing, it also has huge intellectual ambition. Human Traces is a big book in every sense, charting the development of psychiatric medicine and psychoanalysis in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. If Ackroyd opened my mind to the distant past (see above), Sebastian Faulks did much the same for my interest in what might (very) loosely be termed science.
Human Traces tells the story of two pioneers in the field of psychiatry, one English and one French, who open a sanatorium — the Schloss Seeblick — in Austria. Snow Country is, in Faulks’ own words, a sequel of sorts. He has been in ‘loose trilogy’ territory before with his ‘French’ novels — Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Grey. Snow Country returns us to the Schloss Seeblick, which acts as a focal point, bringing together the novel’s two main protagonists.
Faulks is a master at interweaving epoch-defining events into the lives of individuals. Here the backdrop is both the Great War itself and more specifically the damage it wrought. Though the novel spans 20 years, much of it is set in the Thirties, a time of huge uncertainty across Europe. The economic depression has eroded the hopes and optimism of the later-Twenties. Authoritarianism and fascism are everywhere on the rise; democracy, by contrast, is everywhere in retreat, not least in Austria itself where ‘Red Vienna’ is at loggerheads with the Catholic hinterland. It is in these unpropitious circumstances that Anton and Lena — and others — try to find a sense of meaning in their lives.